We get pulled in many directions during the day—unexpected interruptions, phone calls, e-mails. It's time to get control of your schedule.
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).
"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."
Lynda Cardwell is a marketing writer and publicist based in Birmingham, Alabama.
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