Often I get home from work after a 10 hour plus day and I reflect on what I have accomplished in the day. Some days I feel great about making a difference or moving the ball on a very important initiative. Other days I feel like I have been running in a hamster wheel all day long and gone nowhere. The days that I get things accomplished I leave work energized and proud and on those other days I feel exhausted and a bit demoralized.
So what makes some days productive and energizing and other days unproductive and exhausting; it’s the work. What about “the work” is different? Many of us that have roles as knowledge workers are given high level, annual goals and it is our responsibility to determine the best way to accomplish these goals within the resource constraints that exist. This all sounds really straight forward, right? We are smart, we can figure it out and we will prioritize our time and effort to get the work planned and executed. The days that I make progress on things like this are the days that feel great. Then other days I am faced with unsure priorities, email, meetings, conflicts, fire drills, etc.
I have been wondering how I can have more days where I am getting the important things accomplished and I am not distracted by the other tasks that feel urgent but not all that important. Dwight Eisenhower said “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”
So let’s take a deeper dive into how look at the work.
Can we take the time in our day to access the tasks before us and categorize them in this framework? We also might notice some patterns of the task s that fall in these categories. Can we also explore strategies for accomplishing the work in these categories?
Let’s start with LOW - LOW, the task is low importance and low urgency. The first question I would ask is should this be your work? Is it something that even needs to be done? Can it be automated, eliminated, outsourced? My true confession, sometimes I like doing this stuff. These are the mindless tasks like deleted junk mail in you inbox. Sometimes it feels good to do stuff like this. I would say it feels even better when you automate it and the work goes away.
Next, a hard category, LOW – HIGH, he task is low importance and high urgency. How did this low in important task get urgent? Is it a LOW – LOW task that was neglected and became an LOW – HIGH task? If junk mail is never deleted from your inbox it might fill up and stop you from getting your other email that is important.
A similar question can be asked about the HIGH- HIGH, the task is high importance and high urgency. Was this task ignored or did it become urgent because I was busy doing LOW – LOW and LOW - HIGH tasks and neglected it? Some time there really are naturally occurring HIGH – HIGH tasks. Obviously, these tasks should be first on your list!
Now for the HIGH, LOW category – high importance, low urgency. This is the category of tasks that we want to spend the majority of our time doing. This is the work that makes us walk about after a long day and feel accomplished and energized.
We need to manage all the tasks in our day. It is worth the time to think about how to prioritize and manage our work. It is a way of taking care of you and taking care of the work.
