Time (Event) Management

Time Management audio clip

Back to the I-Beam - What Is Important to You?

If you have big goals for your life the chances are that you won’t have enough time to do them all. We need to go back to that I-Beam overtop of the Trade Towers and think about the things we would be willing to wander out, through the wind and rain, and cross for.

We need to look to our goals and decide what the highest priorities are. Knowing what those high priorities are, we can then start to work on them. That will require us to make decisions about what lower value events to sacrifice every day. We need to do this every day, over and over, for the rest of our lives. This is a key principle in living a successful life and achieving our dreams.

"But I'm tired when I get home from work . . ."
Most of us do jobs that are not physically exhausting, yet by the end of the day we feel totally spent. We don't have energy to do any of our more important goals. Why? Some call it stress, or mental exhaustion, but it is a state of mind, not a physical condition where our bodies need to recharge.

Think about the difference in how you feel when you come home from an average day at work but instead of the normal routine, you have a movie you plan to go to. All of a sudden, you're not as tired. The energy that is usually sapped in you now is back in a form of excitement because you're going out, and will see your friends, and you have an anticipation about the fun you're about to have!

Most of the time, if we can just take the next step towards the big goal we have, the energy will flow back into you and you'll get that second wind, being able to accomplish a higher priority goal. It's a MENTAL thing, not a PHYSICAL thing. We need to discipline ourselves to push through to the next step; to the higher goal, and launch ourselves into action!

Event Management and Covey's Urgent versus Important Quadrant audio clip

The Difference Between Important and Urgent
Dr. Stephen Covey refers to this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People specifically in habit 3: Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important.

The basis of Covey's prioritization method involves categorizing our activities into one of four quadrants. He separates our tasks or events into four categories: Low Importance/ Low Urgency, Low Importance/High Urgency, High Importance/High Urgency, High Importance/Low Urgency.

These four categories make up the Covey Quadrant. Most of us spend too much time on the urgent but unimportant areas. We should spend time first on the urgent, highly important activities, getting those highly urgent, highly important things done first and then spending time on the lower urgency, but highly important actions and events. There will always be a balance of all four categories, but the way we weight them will dramatically change our futures.