How to be on top of your project
Wednesday Morning. The day before you were still on a long two-week vacation. You feel refreshed and kind of sad that it’s over. But looking forward to a productive day in the office. You enter the office room with a smile and catch up with some of your colleagues. And still on your mind is that today it will be a productive day. Until you checked your mails. In front of you on the computer screen you see a huge list of never ending emails which demands your attention.
Sounds familiar, isn’t it?
Being overwhelmed in today’s digital world is way too much a familiar for many of us.
And we don’t even need to go to a vacation to feel like there is no way out.
Being a project manager and being in a full control all the time isn’t always easy. Each of us has only 24 hours to spend per day.
And being stressed is counter-productive.
A Better way
We still need to do our job done, but are all the tasks equal?
And here lays the secret to get our life back from the high-demanded work after the holidays.
The Tool
A powerful tool we can use is the Eisenhower Matrix.
It provides us with a visual way to priorities our tasks.
Let’s dig deep on each of those quadrants.
Urgent and Important
Those are the activities we must do as soon as possible. Think about paying your phone bill because tomorrow you won’t have a phone or even worse paying the internet bill because we will be left without a communication with the outside world.
If we have too many things labeled as urgent and important this is a good indication that something in our planning isn’t working out and we let too many things to slip. In this case we must re-visit our habits and try to find a system that can serve us better.
Another option could be that we still need to practice prioritisation in order to get a feeling what is truly important, urgent and everything in between.
Not Urgent, But Important
This is the quadrant we should spend the most of our time.
Those are the tasks important to us and we must finish them timely. If we don’t do that, we risk those tasks to slip to the urgent and important quadrant.
Example of such tasks could study for an exam, or preparing your tax form, or talking with your boss early on for your ideas for a future promotion.
Urgent, Not Important
That is the quadrant of delegation. During our day, week, month or even year, there will be many tasks that require our attention, but in the long run they are not important to us. Example of such tasks could research about a tool that could improve your project performance. It is urgent in this part of the project, but it may not be so important to you compare to everything else on your plate. Delegating to another team player is the key to success.
Not Urgent, Not Important
We are literally surrounded by such tasks. Watching TV, spending time in social media, browsing Instagram or reading same news repeatedly.
Those are the things that doesn’t contribute to the quality of our life and projects and the only possible solution for those tasks is to be discarded all together.
What’s next?
Create a list with everything you need to do in your project, your day/week or month.
A good approach is to dedicate a time block of 10 to 15 minutes and commit to write without stopping. It would surprise you, how many things are on your mind. After that use the tool and split the tasks in the 4 quadrants and decided on where you will work on the first 2 quadrants and to whom you will delegate the 3rd quadrant.
You already know what you must do with the not urgent and not important tasks 🙂
Originally published at vladimirov.info on January 4, 2019.
