Cheesey Time Management
January 23, 2008 in team management
A friend of mine, who happens to be a dutch cheese maker, made an interesting point about time management…
His response to my complaints about how busy I have been recently, was the old time management categories of “not important” “important” and “urgent”.
“Other than the emergencies, how do you split out what is urgent from whats very important?” I asked
“You have to find your question.” He responded
“What question?”
“Everyone has a question that tests the importance of a task. What the question is depends on the job, and the person. But you wouldn’t get very far with my question!” He laughed
“What’s your question then?” I was intrigued
“Will not doing this ruin the cheese?”
Now whilst I wouldn’t get far making cheese, I like this idea. What your question is depends on what your focus is, and what you want to achieve. If your main objective is customer service or account management, then urgent tasks would be based on your SLA or customer experience, whereas finance officers would be looking to keeping the accounts up to date or the invoices paid. Sales guys would focus on whether tasks lead to income, and developers would ask whether putting off a task would be detrimental to the code and/or application.
The question should be task focused, not personal – if your question is something like “will not doing this get me the sack”, then you probably aren’t in the right job!
If you know your goal, you know what is urgent.