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Major Time Management Problem With Prioritizing

By: Nathan T Shaw

Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with time management.



One of the biggest time management goofs of all time is to prioritize by importance or urgency. Another disaster area of time management training is to schedule your activities to time. And the third major mistake people try to manage time with is the traditional weekly to-do list.



In this article I will explain the problem of prioritizing by importance. Having just gone against the grain of traditional time management, you will have a glimmer of hope, and a dashing of skepticism. Hope because you know normal time management systems are a pain. And Skepticism because what I'm going to show you is not common.



Why does time fly? Procrastination (let's be honest here), absent mindedness, deadline pressures, limited resources, overwhelm... not to mention OTHER PEOPLE making demands on your precious time!



And you have the problem of combining your social life with your career development, because we all know that modern lifestyles are crossing the border between your professional time management, and your social life.



Weekends are a great time to catch up o life's basic necessities. Because the week is so hectic. But imagine a handful of chores including cooking, filing in some documents, getting the pet to the vet, mowing the grass. The chores easily stack up. How can you really prioritize it all?



Here's a question for you: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by degree of importance? If you only have a few things to do, then it works a charm. But if life was so smooth you wouldn't be reading an article on time management would you?! So you end up neglecting certain areas of life because prioritizing only works so far. One major question is making the choice between multiple options.



You would never get round to the less important things until they are overwhelming. Like the big pile of dishes to wash up when you've run out of plates. Or organizing the files on your computer when you finally accept that you lose more hours per day looking for things than working.



So Let's Try Combining Importance with Urgency. If it's Saturday afternoon, and Sally's appointment with tutor is 4pm, then that's an urgent priority. So you can read your memo after taking Sally. But what about your hair cut? At what point do you consider that 'urgent'? When it's long? Or when it's 'too' long? Or when the wife nags, or the boss frowns?



How do you really prioritize between reading a memo and taking Sally to her tutor and getting your hair cut? Should you try to prioritize by urgency?



That office memo is majorly important. But the tuition appointment is urgent because it starts in an hour. So the office memo has Priority Importance level A. But your daughters tuition has importance B but urgency A.



The wife made fun of your hair again today so you'll cross off the hair cut from the C priority list and put it on the A priority list. You can read the memo tomorrow (Friday) with enough time left while the shops are open, and in time to get back to take the Wife out, so you decide the hair cut is urgent, and should move to priority level A.



Along comes Saturday afternoon, and Sally's tutorship now gets crossed off the B list and put on the A list because it's Saturday, and you've got Memo and Sally's Tutorship on the A list.



The ABCDE method of prioritizing by importance creates a lot of difficulty. Even with just those handful of tasks to account for. When life is far more varied and complex. And you know the mess experienced with time management when everything is put into the mix. Trying to prioritize by importance and urgency is, as I hope you'll agree, next to impossible, and highly impractical.



Prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work because modern life is way too busy for such a shallow method often what is screamingly urgent is not important compared to other things. Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work, but not today.



You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they're trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management systems you live by.

Article Source: Free Content Articles Directory

More ideas on how to manage time are available from Nathan T Shaw including time management software reviews.

Don't reprint the same version as everyone else. Get your own unique content time management training article here.

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