Page 118 - Learning to Learn

READING EXPERIENCE 5: TIME, PLANNING , AND PRODUCTIVITY
118 L EARNING TO LEARN: BECOMING A SELF-GROWER
to stay an hour later at work to attend a meeting on Wednesday night, AND he promised to quiz Kylie
on her French vocabulary to help her prepare for her exam on Friday. Zach thinks of himself as a fairly
efficient scheduler, but he admits this is a lot to juggle. His situation is fairly representative of the kinds of
prioritizing and scheduling problems that you will deal with not only while in college but also throughout
the rest of your professional, post-school life as well. Given that, how do you choose which task should
be highest priority?
One mistake that people often make is confusing things which are important with things which are
interesting. We tend to naturally fix our attention on things that interest us and that includes animated
figures and catchy music or sound. That’s why cartoons, videos, movies, and television are all so popular.
They ARE interesting. But are they important? Similarly, meeting friends for pizza and a movie is very
interesting—it completely captivates our attention. But is it important? And what about learning to create
a list of sources or how to use the Pythagorean Theorem? Is it interesting? Is it important? No one but you
can decide what is important in your life, but assuming that your goals are important to you (and why else
would you have them?), then any task or time spent which helps you get closer to achieving your goals
must be important.
Chances are that you’ve already had some good experience with prioritizing. The fact that you’re in col-
lege means that you decided that your time is better spent learning and preparing for a profession than
many other alternatives. And when you filled in your weekly schedule, once fixed commitments were al-
located (the highest priorities), the next priority was study time. If you stop and think about it, you actually
decide priorities all the time, often without really being aware that’s what you’re doing. Part of the point
of practicing time management is to elevate some of these nearly unconscious decisions to the level of
conscious choices, made with deliberation and forethought.
There are many good tools and techniques to help you prioritize tasks; each has the potential to help you
manage your time even more efficiently.
ABC List
An ABC list is an easy way to prioritize a list of tasks.
An ABC list works best as a kind of daily “to-do” list
where each item is assigned a category: A for MUST
be done, B for SHOULD be done, and C for COULD
be done. Though this sounds simple, it is a very
effective way to keep you focused upon completing
tasks that are most important. When you are busy or
dreading a particular task, it is sometimes difficult to
decide what ought to be done first and what can wait
until later. For this reason, it is best to create an ABC
task list each morning and revisit and revise it as you move through your day, taking care of “A”
items, then “B” items, and finally any “C” items you have time left for. Some people find it helpful
to assign an estimation of the time each task will take, allowing them to be more aware of how much
time is spent on each type of task. A variation of the ABC list is a task list where each item is assigned
a priority rating from 1 to 5, where 1’s are the highest priority and 5’s are the lowest. There is no right
or wrong way to list priorities; the real trick is not in whether you use numbers or letters but in deciding
how to prioritize competing tasks in the first place and then using your list to guide where you direct
your time and energy.