July 2022: Time Management

Recent months have had some interesting inch- and milestones for me!

I had been working on a novel draft that I finished at the end of June.

I hit my 5th complete year of active commissioned service at the beginning of June.

I completed a year of monthly posts in May.

I took and passed my first Air Force Physical Fitness Test at the beginning of May (96%!)

Each of these sound great and are true social media highlights on their own, but I’m sure most of you have tried doing something like any of the above and therein know that none of these are single-day activities.

Finishing a novel draft with some 61k words in it requires sitting down for multiple nights across multiple months, thinking, and typing. That’s just the functional work; there’s also the emotional/intellectual work of persistence and silencing the internal critic while progressing through the work.

While life as an Air Force officer is perhaps nothing remarkable on its own, these have been five years of specific professional and personal developments over more than 1800 days.

Writing posts every month takes time and thought.

And like any test, fitness tests generally go more smoothly when you spend time preparing for them.

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “The topic is Time Management and you’ve mentioned a few recent accomplishments and how those accomplishments may be earned in an instant but take considerable investments of time to actually achieve. This post is probably about prioritization!”

And you’d be right. What I intend to focus on in this post will not be about how to choose what tasks you want to accomplish in your life, however.

The Meat

What follows is a brief introduction to Rory Vaden’s concept of adding a third dimension to the existing “Importance and Urgency” concept for prioritizing tasks and a visual tool…

In his Ted Talk, titled “How To Multiply Your Time”, Rory covers what he calls the “Focus Funnel” while covering what many of us in the military already learned about prioritizing tasks.

He hits a few important points first:

Paraphrased, you can manage yourself. You cannot manage time.

Efficiency helps with getting more done in less time, sure, but it’s simply not enough – we always end up with more tasks, so all this does is permit you to do more.

Prioritizing based on importance and urgency helps with getting the right things done in a timely manner, but that’s not enough. Prioritizing does not actually eliminate tasks; it simply orders them.

The Third Dimension

Rory covers the dimensions of importance and urgency respectively as follows:

The question of importance asks how much something matters.

The question of urgency asks how soon something matters.

He adds a third dimension of Significance, the question of which asks how long something matters.

He follows these dimensions by offering two questions for us when it comes to considering tasks:

“What can I do today that will make tomorrow better?”

“What can I do now that will make later better?”

You multiply time by working TODAY to give yourself more time TOMORROW.

The particular example he provides has to do with training of personnel.

If you have a new hire, training is an obvious task that needs to be done.

Is it urgent? That depends on the existing projects.

Is it important? If it is not accomplished, then they cannot perform at all.

Is it significant? If the new hire is trained sooner, then they can perform sooner (and the sooner you can reduce your own workload, presumably).

Will training today make tomorrow better? I think that’s an obvious “Yes!”

Focus Funnel

The Focus Funnel helps us decide how to approach tasks and consists of the following flowchart:

So let’s fall through the mostly straightforward funnel!

1) ELIMINATION

Can I eliminate this? Is this even worth doing?

If we say No to something today, we have fewer tasks to do.

If a task is not important or significant, it is probably an excellent candidate for elimination.

2) AUTOMATION

Can I automate this? What does my investment today return to me through the future?

If we can accomplish this task with minimal investment but get a big return out of it, then we have fewer tasks to “do.”

The greater the difference in effort required to automate and the impact resulting from completing such a task will greatly influence whether or not that task is automated.

3) DELEGATION

Can I delegate this? Can I teach someone else how to do this?

If I can get this task accomplished without personally accomplishing it, then I have fewer tasks to do.

Depending on how urgent, important, or significant a task is, it will be more or less appropriate to delegate. Tasks with greater importance or significance may be less appropriate to delegate, but – alluding to an entirely other topic – they may also be great candidates for developing subordinates…

4) DETERMINATION

I cannot eliminate, automate, or delegate this task and must do it myself.

Do I have to do this NOW or can I do this LATER? (In essence, how urgent is this task?)

NOW = CONCENTRATION

If you choose to concentrate on a task, then you know it’s one that takes a higher priority on your to-do list than other tasks.

LATER = PROCRASTINATION

If you choose to procrastinate on a task, then it goes back to the top of the Focus Funnel until you decide what to do with it.

You’ll notice that the Focus Funnel also reuses some of the four D’s of the old two-dimensional prioritization table:

Important and Urgent: Do (CONCENTRATE)

Important, not Urgent: Decide (PROCRASTINATE)

Not Important, Urgent: Delegate (DELEGATE)

Not Important, Not Urgent: Delete (ELIMINATE)

Conclusion

I figured this might be a quick and helpful management nugget to chew on.

There is some space to discuss leadership implications if anyone out there is up to it!

Some questions to ponder as I close this out:

How might adding the Significance dimension immediately help you with your prioritization?

What difficulties do you have with evaluating the importance, urgency, and significance of tasks?

How would you present this to your team? Subordinates? Peers? Supervisors?