For people who don’t know
about me, I am so obsessed about scheduling my work. Be it office or personal,
I always have a TO-DO list with me. In spite of all that I used to wonder why
am I not having enough time for my critical activities. Please note that I also
prioritize what I have in my schedule.
After reading about Time
management in “The 7 Habits of highly effective People” by Stephen R Covey (For
those who have already read the book, please ignore this mail or use it for
refreshing what you have learnt J ), I understood
that I should schedule my priorities rather than prioritizing what is in my
schedule.
Please have a look at the
Time management Matrix and focus on the Activities and its results in each of
the Quadrants.
According to Stephen,
Quadrant I is all about crisis management. Activities in Quadrant II are
critical for effective personal management. III and IV are the distractions
which we have on our way. Looking at the Activities and results, it is evident
that we should focus on Quadrant II. And the only way to get more time for that
is by reducing time spent on III and IV. But focusing on II, we can
reduce a good amount of crisis/fire fight mode, in simple words, focusing on
Quadrant II will reduce the Quadrant I activities.
In our own language, Quadrant
I is about the defects which we get in Testing phases. Quadrant II talks of the
Quality assurance during Build phase. The more we focus on quality of the code,
the less time and effort will be spent on defects J J J Wow!! How simple is that to
say!!!
Now let us identify our
priorities (ideally we should have Quadrant II activities also appearing in our
list). Once that is done, we should schedule the priority. We should understand
that daily schedule is too narrow to help us give big picture, so Stephen is
suggesting us to prepare a weekly schedule based on the priorities which we
have listed. I know some people in recipient list will have even bigggger
picture to prepare quarterly schedule J J but I am going to move from daily schedule to Weekly schedule J
