Priority
Lists and calendars as productivity tools are suitable for accomplishing tasks, but the results and activities may need to be aligned to the right things like values or priorities.
Values set priority. Values are what you think is essential. Priority is how you sequence things to get done. It is what you will pick to do, given choices.
Your goals are clear, written, specific things you plan and prioritize every min of every day. Priorities are evaluated daily because life’s landscape is changing day-to-day. It is not discipline but a consciousness of priorities that are usually the root cause of success or lack of success.
DO: Reprioritize your schedule at noon every day.
Take Control of Your Time and Priorities, Escaping the reactive trap.
The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness
Classify every List item.
If you followed the guide in part 1, you should have four kinds of lists. This would make your tasking manageable.
The most challenging part of assigning things to lists is knowing the classification rules.
- High/High importance and urgency -> do now,
- High/Low importance and urgency -> plan these on the calendar
- Low/High importance and urgency -> find quick ways to complete quickly or delegate it to someone capable and follow up.
- Low/Low importance and urgency -> try to eliminate or delegate
Classify every item on your list into the following categories: –
- DO NOW list: Urgent and Important task
- CALENDAR list: essential tasks that are not urgent. Mark them on your calendar.
- Delivery
- Plans
- Reading
- Opportunities
- Relationships
- Recreation
- DELEGATE list: Urgent but not necessary
- delegate to OTHERS and follow up
- delegate to the CALENDAR and follow up
- TRASH list (Not Urgent or important; this can be your stop-doing list)
- Trash it
- Incubate it for reference data
Make your list as 4 Quadrants on a page. Log your activity and time and see your daily ratio in each of the four lists, i.e., Quadrant1 to Quadrant4.
| QUADRANTS | LIST | ACTIVITIES THAT TYPICALLY CLASSIFY IN THIS LIST |
| Quadrant1 | DO NOW | emergency calls, pings or emails |
| Quadrant2 | CALENDAR | planning for prevention, value delivery, relationship building, learning for production capability, opportunities, recreation |
| Quadrant3 | DELEGATE | other people priorities, meetings, and interruption, phone pings, unsolicited calls or just showing up at your desk, popular activities not aligned with your values. |
| Quadrant4 | TRASH | solicited calls, emails, busy work, trivia, pleasant activities, social media scrolling |
When setting priority, take stock of the work inventory so you do not overbook and then schedule stuff working later. Put in your Big rock of highest priority first.
Prioritize margin, which allows you time to think, reflect and plan vision for the team. We must create margin (ample time to think) on the calendar. Put 3.2 hours of blank calendar spots per day for six days per month or 72 days per year. Recharge to be more and before.
Physically recharge: we cannot perform on less than 6 hours of sleep. We are just kidding ourselves about what performance is. Focus on how good you feel, and use that as motivation to make sleep a more urgent priority.
