Time Management - Marc Mancini

Lining Up Your Ducks: Prioritize! 37
• Read a magazine article about Hawaii. You’re thinking of
vacationing there.
• Go to an evening seminar on personal financial planning.
You’re not signed up yet.
• Listen to your teenage daughter complain about not getting
along with her friends.
• Return a call from someone you don’t know. (You don’t
know what it’s about, either.)
It wasn’t easy to prioritize this imaginary list, was it? This
brings home the fact that your emotional reactions and the context
of each action affect your decision.
As we said, however, scheduling needs to be logical. While
you may think at first that grocery shopping is a higher priority
than going to the ATM, if you need the cash to purchase the
groceries the ATM becomes the higher priority. If completing
one task depends upon first finishing another task, the latter
task takes on a greater priority—even if, from a seemingly
objective viewpoint, it’s minor. And just because you’ll enjoy
reading a magazine article on Hawaii doesn’t mean that you
should do it first.
This imaginary list of personal tasks can translate just as
easily into work-related ones. Sometimes the “payoff” is obvious.
At other times, the WIIFM may not be so evident. To return
to a previous example, you may at first perceive no benefit to
you from volunteering to chair a committee to improve employee-employer
relations at your firm, but the solutions that
Uh-Oh
A magazine ran a “Dilbert Quotes” contest a few years
ago, soliciting real-life examples of Dilbert-type management.The
winning example was from a Microsoft employee who cited
a memo that outlined the following procedure:
1. Beginning tomorrow, individual security cards will be required to
enter the building.
2. Next Wednesday, employees will have their pictures taken.
3. Security cards will be issued two weeks later.