Nowadays we talk a lot about our work-life balance. Everybody wants to attain the perfect balance between what they consider “work” and what they consider “life”.
Many times, people came at me and say that they don’t have enough time to this or that. On the other hand, I see a lot of people who have the same 24 hours and manage to do a lot and still have spare time.
Normally, the challenge is the way how we manage our time or, best said, our priorities.
Someone once said: it’s not a matter of time, it’s a matter of priority.
I often use the idea of this quote and ask myself: “of this bunch of tasks, which are the ones that really are a priority to me?”
And with that I begin to arrange them in an optimal way. For that I need a tool called TIME TRIAD from Christian Barbosa. This triad has 3 areas:
Import;
Urgent;
Circumstantial;
To start explaining each of this areas, let’s get an example:
I have to write this blog post until its posting date and I’m still a few weeks from it. I normally need a day or two to make the research and write the text, so it is an important thing for me to do and I still have plenty of time to do it.
IMPORTANT are all the relevant things that you do in your life and that normally have a date to be concluded.
But somehow, I get busy with other things and the posting day is suddenly tomorrow. Who of us never been in a situation like this where, when you know, the time to do something is NOW?
Red alert! Now this task becomes URGENT. I don’t have those two days initially required for the task.
We can say that what separates the important from the urgent is the amount of time available to perform the task at hand.
Urgent tasks normally cause pressure, stress, could also be unexpected and unpredictable.
Sometimes we have the habit or the skill of transforming important tasks into urgent tasks by the phenomenon of procrastination, but this is a subject for another article…
Last but not the least, CIRCUMSTANTIAL tasks are all the tasks that are not urgent nor important. Tasks that are useless, that are just done because they are somehow socially accepted, but that don’t contribute for your goals. I’m talking about the time that we spend on social media just scrolling our feeds, those parties that we go just to look good to others, hours spent in front of TV, chit-chat talks and many other things.
Now, what is circumstantial is different from person to person and from situation to situation.
A person who spends hours on social media just scrolling the feed and doing nothing is very different of someone who invest the same amount of time as a social media manager. The first one is just spending time and the latter is working.
Other example: navigating on the internet for long periods of time is not good for a student if he is not using that time to improve his grades. On the other hand, if he is using that time to make research that allows him to perform better at school that makes the task important and not circumstantial.
Now that you know the Time Triad, I challenge you to make a list of your daily tasks and divide them into this three areas of Important, Urgent and Circumstantial.
Then, do the urgent first, next the important and finally discard what is circumstantial.
“Decide what your priorities are and how much time you’ll spend on them. If you don’t, someone else will.” — Harvey Mackay