By Peter Turla, timeman.com
To manage your time well, it’s critical to make wise choices when you set priorities; but that can be a major challenge, especially when everything seems like a top priority.
In crises situations, you might be tempted to give top priority to the person who’s yelling the loudest, to whatever is at the top of the pile, or to the item you can finish the fastest. When you’re in a hurry, it’s best to slow down. A few seconds of thinking about where to invest your time could save you hours of misdirected time.
When you set priorities here are some criteria that can help you to sort things out. All things being equal focus on:
- Opportunity
- The future, not the past
- The return on the invested time
- Priorities that support your values
- Long-term fixes rather than the “quick fix.”
- Problem preventing rather than problem solving
- System-wide solutions rather than a local solution
- High-impact priorities that matter to a lot of people
- Breakthroughs rather than perfecting the status quo
- Feeding your elephants (big important stuff) and starving the ants (trivia)
Making wise choices when you set priorities is the key to managing your time well. Using the above criteria should help you to identify what is truly important.