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2008-03-11 03:11:34
11/24/2003
We get pulled in many directions during the day unexpected interruptions, phone
calls, e-mails. It's time to get control of your schedule.
by Lynda Cardwell
Wayne Curtis, vice president of partnership investments at Fannie Mae
(Washington, D.C.), had to fundamentally rethink his approach to work when the
company's public finance business was added to his portfolio this past spring.
Before, an agreement to extend a line of credit to a state or local authority
for a fifty-unit housing project might crystallize over a two-month period. But
now on top of this responsibility was the fast-paced work involved in
evaluating multibillion-dollar bond purchases.
"Suddenly, my business volume had increased by a factor of 10," he says, "and
the rhythm of the new work was very different from the work I had been doing. I
was really grappling with how to stay focused on long-term priorities."
An additional challenge was one faced by many professionals when they become
managers: the expectation that they'll continue to perform as technical experts
even though their primary duties are now managerial and strategic. This creates
the tendency to hold on to tasks that subordinates could handle.
Dilemmas like these highlight the way that the pace and pressure of work crowd
out what author Thomas Hylland Eriksen calls "slow time." Being able to work
faster and to take on more work is jeopardizing our high performance.
Increasingly, he explains in Tyranny of the Moment (Pluto Press, 2001), we find
ourselves with little, if any, of the kind of time ideally suited for the
detailed, focused, and unhurried intellectual and interpersonal work upon which
high performance depends.
How do you make the most of this precious commodity? For some time, management
experts have advised that you develop an understanding of the interplay between
importance and urgency in the tasks you face. More recent thinking, however,
underscores the importance of recognizing the rhythm associated with a given
task.
Triaging the tasks you face
To maximize your slow time, you have to be clear about your purpose, says
Washington, D.C.-based executive coach David Coleman. "Key things you want to
accomplish go into your schedule first, so that everything else falls in line."
Using a technique from the classic time-management book First Things First, by
Stephen A. Covey et al. (Simon & Schuster, 1994), Coleman has his clients
imagine that they have rocks, gravel, and sand with which to fill a bowl. The
rocks represent the most strategically significant tasks; the gravel, the work
that has the next highest priority; and the sand, the least important
activities. Starting with the sand and gravel leaves no room for the rocks. But
by working backward starting with rocks first, then putting in the gravel, and
finally adding the sand clients find that there's plenty of room for
everything. The highest-priority goals get first crack at a client's time, and
the other tasks get accomplished in descending order of importance.
Suddenly the to-do list, once overwhelming, seems very doable.
Many management experts suggest using a simple two-by-two matrix to identify
your highest-priority tasks. First Things First defines the four quadrants in
such a matrix as:
1. Urgent and important tasks (Quadrant I). For example, dealing with a product
recall or completing due diligence before an acquisition can be approved.
2. Not urgent but important tasks (Quadrant II). Examples here include
developing key business relationships and drafting a plan for how your company
will respond to the changes you foresee taking place in your industry 18 months
down the road.
3. Urgent but not important tasks (Quadrant III). Examples of these tasks are
taking impromptu phone calls from sales reps or fielding a request from a
subordinate to help make arrangements for next week's unit party.
4. Not urgent and not important tasks (Quadrant IV). For instance, surfing the
Internet or gossiping around the water cooler.
For this discussion, Quadrant II is the most significant because it represents
the activities that call for slow time.
Bethesda, Maryland-based executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald says that when
her clients use this two-by-two matrix, "it's like a light bulb going off."
They see that valuable time is being wasted on urgent but not important tasks
instead of being spent on those that are important. Fitzgerald advises her
clients to block out time every day for the important but not urgent work. One
focus of this time should be coaching subordinates to take on responsibilities
that are not essential for you to do yourself but that you often hang on to out
of a sense of duty.
"You can easily free up at least 5 percent of your most valuable time by
handing off things," she says. "And those tasks often prove to be interesting
to a direct report or an assistant."
Identifying the rhythms
The more time you devote to important but not urgent work, the more control you
have over your schedule. In particular, the less likely it is that your time
will be consumed by putting out fires. This comes as no big surprise so why is
it, then, that people have so much difficulty reducing the time they spend on
urgent but unimportant tasks? Stephan Rechtschaffen, author of Timeshifting
(Broadway Books, 1996), believes the answer has to do with a process known as
entrainment, in which a person becomes almost psychologically addicted to the
rhythm of the particular task he's performing.
When you get to tasks that are not urgent and not important, something really
interesting happens," Rechtschaffen observes. "The ambient rhythm in modern
life is so fast that even in our leisure time, instead of relaxing, we tend to
take on activities that keep us in this fast rhythm." Thus, typical Quadrant IV
recreational activities tend to be things like watching television (with its
fast cuts and high-energy commercials) or playing video games (in which the
action moves very rapidly).
Key things that you want to accomplish go into your schedule first, so that
everything else falls in line.
David Coleman, executive coach
"Once you're in a rhythm, the tendency is to stay in synchronization with that
rhythm," says Rechtschaffen. The result is that "in modern life, Quadrant I,
III, and IV activities are all happening at high frequencies. Even though the
way to reduce the number of Quadrant I crises in your life is to spend more
time in Quadrant II, people resist going there because its rhythm is so
different."
To be able to concentrate on work that is important but not urgent, you have to
learn how to gear down. Rechtschaffen recommends scheduling specific times for
such tasks. "I set aside time for doing my writing. The ground rule is that
although I don't actually have to be writing during this time, I can't do
anything else. What I've found, as I'm sitting there not writing, is that guilt
feelings or feelings of inadequacy as a writer come up.
"I think this happens to many people who are attempting to do important but not
urgent work: They're reluctant to face the feelings that surface when they slow
down. The feelings hijack us; they act as perpetual motion machines, preventing
us from comfortably entering into the activity. So instead of sitting with the
feelings of guilt or inadequacy, we flee into high-frequency tasks."
The only way out of this trap, says Rechtschaffen, is to acknowledge the
feelings that come up when you try to slow down to let them "rise and then fall
like a wave." Pausing after you finish a high-frequency task and before you
begin Quadrant II work can help you consciously shift gears, he points out, as
can putting on slow, classical music or doing a few minutes of breathing
exercises designed to promote mindfulness.
"It's not so much the outer management of time that's important as it is the
inner management," says Rechtschaffen. "The fundamental error lies in getting
so entrained to a particular rhythm that you can't engage in the task at hand,
whether it's a fast-paced activity or a slow-paced one, in a fully present
way."
Reprinted with permission from "Making the Most of Slow Time," Harvard
Management Update, September 2003.
See the latest issue of Harvard Management Update
Lynda Cardwell is a marketing writer and publicist based in Birmingham,
Alabama. She can be reached at MUOpinion@hbsp.harvard.edu.