After almost 2 years of juggling between being a young mum, moving to the other side of the world, and dealing with an always more and more challenging pace in the office , I have finally decided to come back to reflective writing ! And, as appropriate as it may be, I have decided to re-start with a topic that kept me away from this writing for the past 2 years: Prioritization (with a capital P !)
A standard topic that everybody already deals with every day? Maybe. But as usual, I will try to approach it from a different angle than the plain and common old-fashioned style consisting in having a to-do list, planning meetings, being on time… that we all already know.
So let’s start from the beginning: what does Prioritization mean to you?…
Doing things in sequence so you do more in the day, without wasting time in between tasks? Following a plan so you get more tasks done, faster? Being in control of every minute of your day? Ensuring all the items of your to-do list are crossed at the end of the day? Being on time at every single appointment? Making sure the important is done first, on top of the urgent? Managing your work day so you have time left for yourself, and for your family? Indeed, probably a bit of all of that… And as a result, someone who successfully manages all of this knows how to prioritize his or her daily tasks, and is therefore a successful time manager… And someone who fails to be on time, or to cross all the to-do list items is a poor time manager… easy and simple? Yes and no!
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Sometimes your to-do list seems easy and smooth to handle, sometimes the day goes by and you have not even crossed a single item from it. Why?!
- WHY is it so hard to prioritize (if it is)?
What makes the difference between a smooth day, when you get done all you wanted to get done, and a hard day, when your “to-do” list just grows?
To me, the difference comes from what is outside of my own control.
When you can control your to-do list, of course you can get things done. But things become a bit more complicated when external uncontrollable factors come into play. And precisely because they are out of your own control, you can’t be proactive to act upon these events. The car breaks done and you get 1 hour late in the office… Ouch, 2 items of the to-do list that will stay there. Your boss is calling for an urgent meeting that requires you to move over two other important ones, and on top of that, the so called urgent meeting starts late and lasts longer than expected… Re-Ouch, 5 more items that will have to wait until tomorrow… The stress level is raising and you just feel you don’t know where to start, so you spend 30 minutes just figuring out what is happening… All these events are the factors that make you lose ground and focus – the external environment is becoming stronger than your to-do list, you just can’t control your time anymore.
And we all live in this world, where a major portion of what we do is dictated by our environment rather than by what we can control.
Does it mean we necessarily become poor time managers, and just survive the head just above the water, being lucky on these days when the environment is with us? Certainly not! What it means is that the only way to prioritize our actions and manage our time is by accepting the out-of-control elements and even integrating them in our daily tasks… But how?!
- HOW to prioritize what is not within your control?
“Out-of-control” events come in two ways: either the unexpected events that are part of what helps you to get the important and/or urgent things done, better and faster; or the “noise” that makes you drift away from what is important to you.
The latter is obviously what you want to get out of your way. The challenge is to resist the sense of urgency that some of these actions drag you into. Typically: phone calls, emails (esp the ones stating URGENT, or PLEASE READ in the subject…), boss meetings. They often have an appearance of being urgent and to be dealt with immediately, but often they are not. The shell is what makes these events big in front of your eyes. But they are essentially empty of contents. Why should a meeting be necessarily more important because the boss is calling for it? Why should an email reading “URGENT” for someone should necessarily be urgent for you? All these tasks are the ones that make you drift away from what matters to you. Or in other words, the environment is making the decision on your behalf of what matters to you. Resist. Be true to yourself. Let the noise be noisy, but do not let the noise take control of the time of your day.
This being said, some unexpected events do make us drift away from our initial to-do list. But I do not necessarily see that as a bad thing. The boss calling for an urgent meeting as he or she sees you need help but did not dare, or did not take the time to ask… An email bringing new information that helps to speed up the analysis that was meant to take you 2 hours of work… A phone call telling you that a brand new direction has to be taken in a project… all these are unexpected events, outside of our own control, that are still precious to help prioritize our daily jobs.
Now, I hear the questions: how to differentiate the noise from the useful out-of-control events?
- Now what?…
Now I am going back to my traditional philosophy that helps me resolve 99% of my problems, every day: DEFINE, UNDERSTAND, RESOLVE. Yes, here again, this approach provides the framework to resolve key prioritization questions. Here is how it works:
- DEFINE what is important to you for the day. This can (and probably will) change from one day to the next.
- UNDERSTAND why what you define as important is truly important to you
- RESOLVE, or Prioritize accordingly: consider your options, and most importantly the impacts of not doing what you won’t have time to do, and move on. Don’t stay stuck waiting until a miracle happens. Move on: if you are true to yourself on DEFINE and UNDERSTAND, you can pretty much guarantee that you are doing the right thing. You don’t need to spend hours thinking and re-thinking. As long as you are strong on defining what is important to you and understanding why, you are for sure on the right track. And thinking orderly in steps (1. Define, 2. Understand) helps you to save the time to re-think ten times about the same things.
Somehow, this approach is helping to clearly see what is truly important vs what is not. And once you clearly identify what is important to you, finding out what is urgent will not be difficult: the environment will tell you when the phone rings, the emails surge, or the meeting invitations prompt.
Let’s illustrate on an example: let’s imagine you have a very important project deliverable to complete before the end of the day, but you must leave the office early in order to be at 6PM to see your son playing his first basketball game in his new team.
Such a day would start with DEFINING what is important for that particular day: completing the project deliverable, and be at the basketball game by 6PM.
These might be conflicting priorities, so they must be ranked. The ranking will come from UNDERSTANDING why they are important to you: the project is important because it is a work commitment. Depending on the actual stake at work, it might or might not overtake your son’s basketball game. Eventually, the difficulty lies in what is most important to you: meeting your work commitment, or showing your son how much you care for his basketball game. The answer will depend on every person and every day.
And then, once you are in command of that step (after having integrated the out-of-control factors such as your team member, your son, the customer of your project deliverable…), you can list your options and decide what is the right thing to do for you.
The challenge that comes next when you enter into the RESOLVE step, is another external factor: the judgment of the others – if fulfilling one important thing means to fail another one, someone is going to be unhappy or disappointed by you. Your son, or your boss, or your customer. So part of the UNDERSTAND step must clearly include the “what if’s” and the impacts of failing on one task. True you might fail on one task, but at least you are fully aware of it, and you know what to expect. So you might be seen as failing in the eyes of the others, but not in your true self. And you can explain. Daring saying “no” to your boss is better than giving an unaware yes, but failing in both ways, disappointing your boss and your son…
To conclude, “DEFINE, UNDERSTAND, RESOLVE” is my everlasting approach to any type of problem, and I have even found that it helps me to address time management issues. Not necessarily by allowing to do more, faster; but by ensuring full awareness of what matters to me, and acting accordingly. Prioritization and time management, in my mind, does not just mean to do more and more every day – there is always a point when you cannot do more anymore. Prioritization, to me, means to make the right choice to do what is important to me, and to leave aside what is less important to me, even if it might sometimes mean to appear weak to some people – even the boss – who do not know all what matters to me. I cannot control what I cannot control, but I can integrate the uncontrollable to my busy schedule and not let the noisiest take control of my life. Can you? What is your way to manage your priorities, when everything seems important and when you are pulled in all directions?…
The Process Excellence String of Ariadne 