Prioritise your life like a Jedi

Time management is so important and one that many of us struggle with. It is hard to resist the urgent requests that are put in front of us, whether its a colleague asking for advice or a student that’s appeared at you door having a meltdown, or similar home life related urgencies.

In any job that gives service to others and certainly in teaching, we often have to respond to a situation now - not in 10 minutes when we’ve finished marking a book. However, there are times when it would be beneficial to not respond immediately, even if something appears urgent. This is where a crucial deciding factor comes in… Importance. If something is urgent but not important, it does not need to take priority. For example, a phone call appears urgent because of the sound that alerts you, but it is not necessarily important. Neither is a text pinging through to your phone or an email that pops up on your screen. These all appear urgent, but many of them do not need to be dealt with right that minute and if you do attend to them, it breaks your trail of thought and massively impacts on your productivity. Another example could be colleagues going to the staff room for a coffee. It is urgent, in the sense that it is happening now, but it is not necessarily important to do it. 

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But how do we decide what is important or not?

​This is where we need to understand what our values and our goals are. These may differ at times from the values and goals of the organisation you work for. So, if you highly value building social relationships with people you work with and it makes you feel good to have social breaks at work, then the earlier example of going for a coffee with colleagues, becomes urgent and important to you, but might not be to your boss.

Stephen Covey describes these two traits
- Urgent and Important -
as part of a Time Management Matrix in his book
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

​The principle is that if things are urgent and important then they have to take precedence, but ideally we will be operating in the Non Urgent and Important quadrant as a priority and then move down to the Urgent but Not Important and then finally to the Non Urgent and Not Important tasks.

The crux here though is to know what your goals and values are, otherwise you may frequently be spending all your time doing tasks that are not important and not finding time for the ones that are.

​If you are a list maker, see if you can organise the tasks into the format of the quadrant above by identifying what is really important to you and what is urgent and then try and organise your day around doing the most important things first.

It can take discipline, because quite often it means leaving things like checking mail several times a day, or ignoring a text until later, or not browsing through Facebook at all. These are my weaknesses, you may have others. For me I have to remove these distractions to be truly productive because a notification on my phone can suddenly jump into the Urgent category, even if it is unimportant and it takes my attention away from whatever I was doing.

Block out distractions

​For example when I mark, I set myself a timer to get each essay marked in 15 minutes or less, but my timer is on my phone. So I also put my phone into ‘Airplane Mode’ so no other distractions can pop in while I’m marking. It makes all the difference to my productivity levels!

This is not a new strategy for Time Management, but it is a powerful and relatively simple one. I like being reminded of it every now and then and I hope it proves useful for you at some point this term.

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