Some trainers will tell you the ‘key to time management is to prioritize by importance…
They’ll give you the ABCDE Method which has you prioritize your tasks as:
A. Top priority
B. Second priority
C. Thingsnotsoimportant
D. Thingsyoucandelegatetoothers
E. Things to take off your to-do list altogether
Up to a point it can work in your career (but not very well).
But it fails miserably when you try to use it with your personal life.
At what point would we get round to things like cutting the grass, exercising, filing papers, or reading your kids night time stories?
There are always going to be A’s so when would you ever get to the B’s? (Let alone the C’s).
So the modern interpretation of ‘prioritizing by importance’ includes the notion of ‘urgency’. Now let’s see how it works in a real-life scenario…
Here’s an example of a brief to-do list you create on Friday evening ready for your weekend (play with me here).
The letters column represents how ‘important’ each item is (A being most important), and the numbers represent how ‘urgent’ they are (1 being most urgent).
Of course Friday evening is pizza and video store night, so you manage to pay the phone bill but are distracted by relaxing at the end of your hard week at work so don’t get anything else done from the list you’ve made. But at least you’ve made the list, which is more than most people manage. So…
…Come Saturday, it’s time to get some of these things done.
But since you created the list on Friday, your feelings and perspectives of the importance and urgency of some of these things have changed a little (highlighted in red)
The point of prioritizing by importance and urgency is to get a list of things to do in order of which to do them.
So looking at Saturday’s list we have 4 items with an A-level priority. And 5 things with a 1- level urgency.
Let’s re-order our list accordingly…
This is when they’re ordered by most-to-least important:
And this is when they’re ordered by most-to-least urgent:
Erm… we still need to make a decision about which items to do, even though we’ve ranked them ‘most important’ and ‘most urgent’.
Important things are often not urgent. Urgent things are often not important. Let’s see what we got done over Saturday by looking at Sunday’s updated list.
So we got 4 of the items done on Saturday, changed one of the items priorities to more important (Mow the lawn is now a B), and changed 2 items ‘urgency’ factor to 1.
Could you keep up that kind of prioritization every single day, for all areas of your life, with every to-do item? It certainly wouldn’t be smooth sailing would it…
But the time management trainers would have you at least try. Why? Because this is all that exists in time management circles today.
The ABCDE Method of prioritization is difficult to imagine working even with only a few tasks…
If you’ve ever tried this technique whilst trying to account for all of your projects, hobbies, interests, responsibilities, ideas, plans, etc. I’m sure you agree how difficult it is.
And the bottom line:
“Prioritizing by Importance or Urgency is unnatural, and destined to failure.”
Prioritizing by importance or urgency turns time management away from being natural, spontaneous, flexible, and fun… and towards being a chore; difficult at best… impossible at worst.
Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work (like in 1850!), but not today. Modern life is way too busy for such a robotic method.
The only place this works is in business, at a top level management position.
Why? Because higher management KPIs (key performance indicators) are based on very few specifics,
PLUS: they have a team of managers, assistants, secretaries, and receptionists they can direct.
As such, they have fewer things to actually ‘do’. If they get too much on their plate, they delegate. Therefore they have the comfort of prioritizing by A, B and C. And Delegating what’s left (D). Or deciding not to do the things at all (E).
But for your modern personal life, or in lower management, or normal working life, or entrepreneurial projects… there is more opportunity, responsibility, tasks, chores, projects, ideas, distractions, possibilities, people, obligations, etc. than we can possibly manage by the simplistic idea of prioritizing by ABCDE.
It’s a bad technique that should not be taught any more. Except to top level directors. It doesn’t work folks. And it’s not your fault!
Check out the 4th Dimension for Natural Time Management.
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