- Separate urgent from important in your own week
- Protect blocks for work that never gets done
- Decline or renegotiate a request without damage
Why the list keeps growing
A to-do list has no capacity limit, so it fills past what any week can hold. A calendar does have a limit, which is why work that is not in it tends not to happen.
Two habits do most of the heavy lifting:
- Estimate how long something will take, then put it in the calendar.
- Assume you will be interrupted, and leave the gaps to absorb it.
Urgent is not important
Sort a week into four boxes:
- Urgent and important - do it now. Crises, real deadlines.
- Important, not urgent - schedule it. Planning, development, relationships, the thing that prevents next month's crisis.
- Urgent, not important - most interruptions. Question it, batch it, or hand it over.
- Neither - stop doing it, and notice how long it survives unnoticed.
Almost everyone lives in box one and box three, and box two is where the improvement actually is.
Your manager asks you to take on a working group. Your week is already full. What is the strongest response?
Three habits worth keeping
- One planning block a week. Twenty minutes on a Friday to place next week's important-not-urgent work in the calendar.
- Batch the small stuff. Two email windows beat forty interruptions. The cost of a switch is the ten minutes afterwards, not the two minutes of the task.
- A shutdown line. A fixed point when work stops, with the list written down for tomorrow. Unfinished work you have written down stops circling at 2am.
4 questions. Pick an answer to see whether it is right and why.
1.Important but not urgent work should be:
2.The real cost of an interruption is mostly:
3.The most useful way to decline extra work is to:
4.Writing down unfinished work at the end of the day helps because:
What is one important-not-urgent task you will put in next week's calendar?
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