Tag Archives: prioritization

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Maintaining Focus

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The current pandemic represents a significant distraction for everyone.  Pandemic related stories have pushed virtually everything else that is newsworthy aside.

From experience I have found the best results, those achieved most efficiently and of the highest quality are derived from being the center of our interest or activity (i.e., the focus).

 Prioritize

Even with lots of serious highly and impactful events going on around us, being able to concentrate and act on whats really important is a best practice.

 

Dealing with more than one task at time can result in the spreading of your attention to an extent that although everything might get addressed,  important aspects could be overlooked leading to mistakes.

Perhaps surprising, as well, studies haves shown  multitasking can actually result with more overall effort being expended than if each task was addressed separately although overall duration is greater.

Distractions

Recognizing distractions and allocating appropriate attention to them lets you ensure your focus is on the things that matter most at that point in time.

Things that don’t require your immediate attention, albeit worrisome and nagging at you, rising to that call for attention could easily negatively impact the effectiveness of resolving your priorities.

That is, the  things that provide the greatest value at any point in time are the things that are bested served by getting our prime focus.

Pay Attention

If you recognize yourself trying to pay full attention to multiple things concurrently, press the pause button.  Think it through.  What can I change and what is largely out of my control.?  What should I focus on?  Answer the question and act accordingly.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

How to stop Firefighting

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My post on Saturdays  used the analogy of firefighting to help explain the concept of urgency and importance as it relates to your priorities. Urgent/ Important represented the equivalent of fire fighting.

On the other hand Important/ Not Urgent activities are often subject to procrastination, they get a default priority. That is we’ll  get to them when we get to them, the motivation to do the task is not obvious.

How focusing on important not urgent makes a diiference

Consider the fire-persons ( formerly known as firemen) sitting around the fire house waiting for an alarm.

Actively promoting fire prevention awareness to the community is important.  Fire prevention training , while important is not urgent (obviously not as urgent as fighting an active fire).  However, fire prevention reduces fires and so there is less firefighting.

Effective fire prevention results in less fires, leading to less fire fighting, so more time for important activities like fire prevention.   It’s a positive upward spiral – focusing on the important not urgent reduces the important – urgent (i.e., less firefighting).

Less firefighting means less of the damage that is typically associated with fires.

A Real Life Example

Without providing details, in order to protect the innocent, here’s a real example of this I recently observed.

An organization I am familiar with recently completed some major technology changes.  Not unexpectedly this created many fires.  The majority of the resources focused on putting out the fires.  And, immediately as one fire was out three more sprung up in it’s place.

The fire fighters were clearly getting exhausted.  The good news, and point of the story a small group of leaders in the organization took it upon themselves to identify the root causes, craft short, medium and long term strategies to address these along with specific action plans.

While creating the strategies did not appear urgent, nor provide immediate satisfaction, the key  outcome  of the strategic planning was a structured and methodical approach to issue management.  Within two months, no more fires.  Fires which might have continued for another 6 months or a year otherwise.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Prioritizing Your Time

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Fighting fires often becomes the default prioritization process.  This applies both personally and organizationally.  It is easy to divert your effort to the fire or even just wait for fires before acting.

The urgent/important model

image

In the four quadrents above, the urgent ones relate to fire fighting (i.e., fighting the fire is urgent).  The upper left activities are  probably justified in receiving attention, they are an important task.

The lower left quadrent is the problem.  Here we tend to spend time due to a false priority.  It is really not important to a accomplish ( e.g., a completely safe fire in pit with minimal danger of spreading)

We might waste our time watching the safe fire in the pit because we have been asked to (i.e., given our priority) even though we know it is not a valuable or important task (i.e., unlikely anything worthwhile will come of it).

Important – Not Urgent

Spending time on important things although there are not urgent is extremely valuable.   Typically these activities lay the strategic foundations for success.

The impact of completing important activities might not be immediate but over the long term it has a powerful effect (thats why they are classified important)

Impact of Spending time on Not Important – Urgent

It takes a lot of will power to focus on tasks that are not urgent and when there are urgent – not important tasks available, these often take priority because it is easier to do so.

Procrastination is a well known human trait and urgent not important things support this undesirable behavior when considered against the important tasks – they are typically harder so why bother.

A word of Warning/ A word of Advice

Stay out of the bottom right quadrent.  If you are in paid employment, people who spend too much time doing unimportant activities no one cares about are terminated. (Although some sneak by for years)

Spend as much time as you can in the upper right quadrent as these activites will lead to both a strong feeling of personal accomplishment and great success.  Unfortunately like the way to attaining many good things, it is the harder route.