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The Time Target

“I hate to criticize, but you’ve only been here for two days and you’re already three days behind schedule.”

If you take a look at the literature concerning time management or attend a seminar on the topic, you will find that almost everything revolves around the questions of importance and urgency. Logically, there are four possible combinations:

• important and urgent

• neither important nor urgent

• important but not urgent

• not important but urgent

Next, you will probably be introduced to a diagram using the so-called Eisenhower method. This diagram is a model with four quadrants. Although this model may occasionally be useful as a trigger to begin reflecting on importance and urgency, in practice it will not save you much time. (Don’t worry, an alternative model is coming up soon.) Why? If the matter falls into the quadrant “important and urgent,” the model says you should deal with it immediately. Theoretically that is fine, but what do you do if you have ten such tasks at the same time? Then you are encouraged to postpone the quadrant “important but not urgent.” Deal with it at a later time.

Whether that is a reasonable decision we will discuss a bit later. But what to do about the tasks that other people want to have completed right away? The Eisenhower Method states that things falling into the quadrant “not important but urgent” should be delegated to someone else. That makes a certain kind of sense. But what do I do if there’s nobody I can delegate my task to, or if the people who theoretically are available are already overloaded with work? We need answers to these questions.

Finally, for the quadrant “not important and not urgent,” the model tells us to dispose of the activity, in other words, not complete it at all. It does make sense up to a point to spend as little time as possible on tasks that are neither important nor urgent.

But the biggest problem with this diagram is that it doesn’t help to solve the basic problem: having too much to do in too little time. How many people, in the midst of feeling overwhelmed, have the time and clarity to sit down and organize tasks according to the quadrants in order to devise the best strategy?

Nevertheless, questions about the importance and urgency of a task are central aspects of our concept of time intelligence. Let’s look at an alternative approach: the time target. Since, logically, there remain four possible combinations, here too we have four sections – picture them as the rings of a dartboard.

One thing before we start: it would be useful to know how we keep score in this game of time management. Here’s the system: the outer rings give you fewer points and the inner ones more. Now imagine you have 40 darts to throw. These represent the 40 hours of your workweek.

Where do you aim with your darts? Of course you aim for the center, the innermost ring. Will you always hit the bull’s-eye? Of course not! But the more skilled you become at placing your darts, as with managing your time usage, the more often you will also attain the highest number of points. Now let’s see how we can attribute one of the possible combinations discussed above to each of the rings of our new target.

Our seminar participants always reach the same conclusions: in the end what matters are two things: 1) the results that we are able to produce and 2) the stress level. We want to get the best possible results within a certain period of time while keeping the stress level tolerable. We’re not aiming for zero stress, but at least it should not chronically exceed an acceptable level. Our criteria for the assessment (our points) are, therefore, our results and our level of stress. Let’s remember that for later.

What is the outermost ring? When we ask seminar participants, they usually answer quickly and unanimously, “not important and not urgent.” Once we have agreed on this, we have a clear definition for one of the four rings in our time target (let’s call this ring number one).

While it is not a problem if we spend some time in this area, it does not give us many “points.” What would happen if you spent a lot of time here, though, doing things that are neither important nor urgent? What were our criteria again? Results and stress. Of course, if we pursue lots of unimportant tasks the results will not be good. The stress level may briefly be very low, but only until the really important tasks catch up with us. One example for a task that belongs in the first ring would be gathering statistics but not evaluating them critically and failing to act on them. The introduction of new systems that are no better than the old ones also belongs in this category.

This category comprises all activities that do not bring improvement, and we will henceforth refer to it as the “area of escape,” because most people who spend a substantial amount of time in this area are trying to escape from other topics they don’t want to deal with. This applies to work as well as private life. Does this ring any bells for your own organization?

What combination of qualities do we put into ring number two (counting from the outside)? Here, too, most seminar participants agree – even if there is sometimes a bit of discussion. Into this ring we put the combination “not important but urgent.” We can transform all activities from the first ring into this new category by adding an imminent deadline, such as the useless statistics, for example, that need to be compiled by the middle of the month. The deadline is fast approaching and we have hardly any time left. Now this unnecessary task is causing us time pressure.

What would happen if you spent the majority of your time in this category? Correct: no good results. To be honest, the results would not be any better than in ring one (the outermost ring). Sometimes it can appear as though we achieve good results only because of the high level of stress. This is why this area will be called the “area of illusion”: there is the danger of believing something is important merely because it is urgent. Think about it for a moment. We all risk succumbing to this illusion, especially when someone is yelling at us. There are many different strategies for communicating that a task is urgent, starting with raising the volume of one’s voice, through frequency of repetition of the request (via multiple channels of communication: email, a telephone call, sometimes even a personal visit), to the number and rank of people on copy. By now it should start to be clear that we actually want to spend as little time as possible in ring two.

What do we place into the third ring from the outside, and what should we put into the innermost ring? The complexity of the situation has been drastically reduced by now, since both “unimportant” combinations have already been assigned. Therefore, the two remaining rings must contain “important” areas. So we are left with the question where “important and urgent” and “important but not urgent” belong. Here, too, most people concur that “important and urgent” belongs in the center. This is where many people believe we should be spending our time! Really? Here is the crucial point at which time intelligence falls by the wayside, the reason many working people find themselves in the so-called rat race. Let’s take a look at the entire picture.

Contrary to the majority of time management experts, we feel that “important and urgent” belongs in ring number three (still counting from the outside), and not in the innermost one! What belongs in the category “important and urgent”? All functions that have a distinct impact (and are therefore important) that you need to complete under time pressure. Most working people “live” here, spending the majority of their work time under these conditions.

What effects does it have to work on high-impact tasks under time pressure? First, let’s look at the positive aspect: you achieve relatively good results. If you consistently filter out unimportant things (rings one and two, both urgent and not urgent), you have an above-average sense of priority management and therefore also above-average results.

What’s the negative aspect of this way of proceeding? The price you pay is a permanently high level of stress. This third ring therefore is called the “fire department zone,” since the fire department necessarily carries out activities that are both important and urgent at the same time. If no one puts out the fire, the house will burn down – definitely not a good result! And the urgency is clear: if you wait three days to put out a fire, it will be too late.

Psychological reasons can play a role in why some people spend a lot of time in a high-stress category. Those who are chronically extremely busy are often perceived by others to be highly important; at least many chronically busy people believe that other people see them that way. Of course, those other people may be too occupied with themselves to spend a lot of energy admiring their busy coworkers.

Now we come to the bull’s-eye. Here we place “important but not urgent.” Even people with a large share of high-importance, high-urgency functions should aim to spend more time in this area. Why? All activities that fall into this category lay the groundwork for and are prerequisites to being fast and effective when that metaphorical fire should happen to occur. The fire company needs practice drills and maintenance. The gas and water tanks need regular refilling, optimally without the two being confused. So, among other things, preparatory and preventive measures belong in this ring.

Will it be possible for the world’s best fire department to prevent every fire? Of course not. But if it can prevent four out of the next twenty fires, and develop better and faster methods of putting out another three, then that is truly important work being done in ring four. Let’s compare the results of this fictional fire company with those of a fire company that is very skilled at putting out fires but only operates in ring three. What do we see? Ring four means both better results (fewer overall fires, and some of them extinguished more quickly than before) and less stress – certainly a most desirable situation! How much of your time do you spend putting out sudden and unexpected fires?

We have already established that it is impossible to avoid all acute situations, which is why we need a ring three. No one is completely prescient. Let us take an example from private life. Imagine you get a call from school that your daughter has had an accident. It’s nothing life-threatening but she has broken her arm. In this case it is naturally important as well as urgent to take care of the matter. In the work world, such “emergencies” arise frequently. But in fact, many matters that originated in ring four, and optimally could have been completed there, wander over to ring three with time (or rather the lack thereof) without anyone having done anything, quite literally.

A classic example is your tax return. If you live in the U.S.A., you know it’s due on April 15. The topic is important because it can have distinct negative consequences if you do it wrong or fail to hand it in. You are informed long in advance of this deadline and therefore theoretically have more than enough time to get the tax forms filled out. Without your doing anything, the activity drifts one ring farther to the outside with the passage of time and lands in the stressful ring three.

The additional time we’re recommending you spend in the bull’s-eye, ring four, has to come from somewhere. Where is it supposed to come from? Primarily this time must be taken from the two outer “unimportant” categories. Classic examples from your private life could be reducing the time you spend watching TV, arguing less, and organizing things so that you don’t need to spend lots of time looking for them and can get errands done faster. Topics at work can involve redundant activities, getting bogged down in details, excessive perfectionism in less important areas, time for tactical games, small talk (of the kind that does not deepen the business relationship), and of course wasting time in meetings that are less than optimally productive (more on this topic later).

You can immediately spend more time in the bull’s-eye if you are disciplined about limiting the time you spend in rings one and two. In the medium run, you will increase the percentage of time you spend in the innermost productive category by learning from those stressful situations and sudden fires. You can become better able to prevent some situations from recurring while becoming better prepared to face others. That is true time intelligence. With time and practice, it is absolutely possible to have a successful career and spend more than half of your time in this zone of time intelligence. The two are in no way mutually exclusive. On the contrary: there is a clear positive correlation between amount of time spent in the time intelligence zone and professional success, satisfaction, and low stress level.