Change Right Now That Deals

¶ … change right now that deals with how I manage my time, it would be to stop procrastinating. This is the biggest reason why I always seem to fail to accomplish all the tasks I set out to do for the day, no matter how neatly they are outlined on my calendar. After the readings for this assignment, I realized that the majority of my time is spent in both quadrants three and four.

I also realize that this is probably the main reason why I never seem to accomplish much no matter how organized I think my schedule is. Reading Habit 3 was an eye opener because although it seems that it will work, it goes against everything that I have ever learned about planning. I've always been taught to take care of emails, phone calls and snail mail first. As such, that is how my planner is arranged.

By arranging my work like and personal life this way, I always thought I was being productive when in fact I believe this method of planning had a great deal to do with why I procrastinate so much. When I attempt to plan my schedule on a daily basis, whatever doesn't get done one day is always pushed back to the next day. Eventually, or at least most of the time this task seems to go undone completely.

I figured that tasks that are planned on a daily basis seem less and less important if I give myself permission to constantly push them back a day or two, or even more. Thus, in the end they go undone. I know that quadrant two is where I need to be, but getting there isn't easy. Emails have to be answered; a ringing phone should be answered, etc. Or so I thought.

By taking an hour or more each day to answer emails or to pick up the phone every time it rings is robbing me of valuable time I could be focusing on things that are important, yet no so urgent. Working primarily from quadrants three and four and then trying to work in quadrant two was not an easy task. I am so accustomed to daily planning and the focus of quadrant two is to plan things on a weekly basis.

According to Covey, weekly planning provides greater balance than daily planning because it helps to prioritize our schedules instead of scheduling our priorities (2004, p. 161). Although this concept is not difficult to understand, I could not seem to grasp it in the beginning because I thought that if I planned on a weekly basis instead of daily, something would surely get lost in the shuffle. I had to read and re-read the section of the chapter regarding this until finally one day it clicked.

Even though I was trying to plan my schedule on a weekly basis, I found that I was still operating from a daily perspective. Nothing had changed in my life and I was still operating from every quadrant except quadrant two. One day was an exceptionally bad day. Too many emails were flooding my inbox and my phone was ringing off the hook making it impossible for me to actually work on the tasks that were important.

Instead of going into a total meltdown, I decided to answer only those emails that were important and take only phone calls that were important. By looking at the subject line of the email, I could tell whether it deserved my immediate attention or whether I could leave it marked unread and get to it later. I let all calls go to voicemail. By the time I was ready to check my voicemail, only two people had left one yet.