By Will

I never remember my dreams. I know I have them, and when I wake up, for the briefest of moments the memory of them is crystal clear in my head, but almost instantly, I forget them. To me, time/task management classes are exactly like that. While in the class, task management techniques are clear and make unarguable sense. I promise myself, once the class is over, that I will remember what I’ve learned. But just like my dreams, when the course ends, what I’ve just learned evaporates, leaving me to go back to being useless and ineffective at managing my daily tasks.

I’m terrible at implementing task management techniques and it’s one of those skills that I lack enormously…which is why I find myself working evenings and weekend to finish things. I was given a simple little piece of advice in the office the other day that has been helping me manage.

I’m in quite an interesting role. I support one of our senior executives in a smorgasbord of projects. He delegates things with disparate degrees of difficulty (from booking hotel rooms to international business strategy) and vague instruction, with very short time frames and always pitches his latest request to me as his number one priority. I’ve been working with our HR department recently on a project, and in passing the other day, the project lead accosted me and asked

“How are you getting on with your deliverable? We’ve a team meeting tomorrow and you’ll need to present something…”.

I whined “I’ve got about 15 things due at the moment - it’s hard to think about the one tomorrow when you’re boss gives your 10 number one priorities a day”

At that moment I saw my evening unfold where I’d be working late yet again to deliver something for the next day. It was at that point that one of our other managers threw in some advice.

“You know you shouldn’t use the word priority. Don’t use the word priority. The words you need to use are urgent and important.”

A discussion followed that made total sense and I actually remembered after I walked away. He advised that most tasks should be assigned either a tag of “urgent” or “important” or both to decide which tasks take precedence over others.

So let’s take an example from my boss from during the week - he called and said he wanted me to prepare and submit a report to Corporate for the following day which he had forgotten to do. That would be tasked as both “urgent” since it was due tomorrow and “important” because it was going to Corporate. Earlier that same day my boss had asked me to prepare a detailed agenda for a meeting also for the following day that he wanted to review before the end of the day. That would be classified as “urgent”, but not as “important” since Corporate always trumps local office stuff. Hence even though my boss asked for the agenda for the end of the day, I spent my time doing the report to Corporate instead and finishing the agenda the following day.

I know this seems like common sense (I did warn in the title that this was simple task management), but when you’re getting tasks thrown at your like snowballs in a playground, it can be hard to figure which should come first. Especially for someone like me who tends to want to finish everything to deadline, regardless of how ridiculous that deadline is. So task management for idiots like me; is the task “urgent” or “important”.