Time Management - A Mystery?

Let me start with a question, "Do the URGENT tasks on your daily TO-DO list outnumber IMPORTANT tasks?". If your answer is in affirmative, or your TO-DO list has significant number of URGENT tasks, I personally feel that you may have a time management problem; petentially, if not in actual.

The reason for this understanding is very simple, URGENCY is linked with time. That is, either we have the paucity of time, or the time to complete the URGENT task is in immediate future. What it means that either you had not planned for it, or because of short sightedness / environmental factors, we have to expedite the urgent task. In either case, this can only be done by dedicating resources to address the urgent task.

We may decide to either re-allocate the resources from current allocations, or we may dedicate spare resources (if any). The fact of the matter is, in order to complete the urgent task we need to either disturb the current allolcation or allocate additional resources. This way either we adversely impact the tasks from where the resources has been taken, or we increase the cost of allocation.

This happens because all of us operate under given constraints, and performance is optimized (at least tried to) within given constraints. Therefore, any increased demand on resources would need either a shift in the constraint boundary, or re-allocation witihn pre-defined constraints.

Big deal; re-allocation solves the problem, so what is the hitch? Well, re-allocation solves your urgent problem; however, has the potential to make other task(s) (from where the resources have been drawn) urgent. Thereby trapping us in a vicious cycle of attending to urgent tasks.

So, is there any way out? Yes, and No. Well, what I meant was that Yes, we can address those as long as those are exceptions, and No, if those become norm.

Therefore, the key is,
1) Keep your urgent tasks to minimum, if could not be donw away with completely
2) The re-allocation of resources should be judicious, and should be as per your set priorities
3) Since not everything can be controlled, therefore, communicate the impact arising out of urgency; it will help in answering the re-prioritization and adverse impact
4) Understand that no one can do all the tasks on their own, therefore, direct, guide, support, and delegate. How effective that would be, would depend on your understanding of "readiness"
5) Optimize resource allocation - as per importance / significance
6) Monitor the progress, and control the variations
7) Refine your prediction and allocation of resources by keeping in mind your "effective capacity", and not through theoretical or available capacity, and feeding back the data back into system

Now, let me develop it a little further from s/w project perspective. Many of us have an understanding that identification, definition, allocation, sequencing, execution and control of activities, is time management. In a way, it is true because this is what exactly what we saw so far in this article. However, sometimes this understanding is limited to schedule of a project alone. Still fine, as long as we understand that limited scope from a project perspective, and we operate in a wider scope.

In nutshell, it would be a mystery, as along as we spend significant amount of our time on urgent tasks rather than on important tasks.