Building Blocks of Time

Building Blocks of Time

This is a post from  Andrew Rogers LL.B.  CEO of www.foolkit.com.au.

How do you make sure that some time is set aside for those important tasks that are not urgent?

If you write a list of tasks for the day you should always start with the more urgent matters at the top and put the less important lower down.

Every task at the top of the list is going to take you longer than expected.  And you’ll keep on slotting in other tasks at the top as the day progresses and never make it to the lower tasks.

All of which is fine if your only focus is about today.  But what about tomorrow?  Don’t you want things to be better tomorrow?  Don’t you think that some time spent improving your systems, mentoring staff, planning, marketing … might not pay bigger dividends in the future?

My suggestion is to put that first list to one side for now.  Instead, decide what proportion of the week you want to set aside for each category of tasks.  Then set aside a block of time that reflects this.  A one hour block in a 50 hour week is only 2% of your time.  Surely you can achieve at least a 2% improvement by investing this time.

Create five or six blocks per day maximum to keep it simple.  If you need to see a client first thing in the morning and that robs half an hour from the first time block, then take a half hour of the client time block to finish working on the first block.   You might have a regular block that on Monday you use for mentoring staff; Tuesday it is for planning etc.

The old way, you wouldn’t run into these tasks until you finally made it that far down the list – probably in a few months time.  My way, you run into them much sooner than that and they become part of your regular practice and get the priority they deserve.