I recently had a promotion at my job, and my new position requires me to do more and different things. This means that what time I had is even more scarce. Therefore, I need some sort of time management.
The last .NET user group meeting that I attended inspired me to try a new method in time management. The presentation there was about how to be a good developer. One of the stories in that presentation was about development team who had a board of priorities with the tasks listed on sheets of paper. This inspired me to create my own board of priorities that I posted on my cubicle wall. I put it on my wall to let everyone know what my queue of tasks are. I put my tasks on note cards and place them into one of three categories: Doing, Need To and Want To. I think these categories are pretty self-explanatory. I’ve tried it for couple weeks now, and it’s been working out. Nobody has tried to mess with it yet, and it’s a constant reminder of what I have on my plate. I think I’ll keep doing it.
Another point about time management that I wanted to mention is something one of my co-workers mentioned to me. He boiled time management down to a “Punnett Square”. Do you remember doing that in Jr. High science class when you were learning about genetics? Though, this doesn’t have do with genetics. My co-worker said that the one axis is importance (important and not important) and the other is urgency (urgent and not urgent). You would then classify your task in one of four squares. My own personal twist on this idea is as follows. First of all, the tasks in the not important and not urgent square practically don’t exist. They shouldn’t receive any of my attention. Secondly, the tasks in the important and urgent square are what I should be doing presently. Thirdly, my effort for the tasks in the important and not urgent square should be spent trying to make them more urgent. This means that I’m trying to see whether they would eventually be important and urgent enough to be what I’m working on. Then for the tasks in the final square (not important and urgent), my effort should be spent trying to make them less urgent meaning they would eventually go away.
