Page 241 - Foundations of Learning, 4th Edition (Revised)

asked 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.

You’ve already had some good experience with prioritizing; the Personal Development Methodol-
ogy made explicit use of prioritizing based on values. The fact that you’re in college means that you
decided that your time is better spent learning and preparing for a profession than many other alter-
natives. And when you filled in your weekly schedule, once fixed commitments were allocated (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.

Action Priority Matrix: Impact and Effort

The Action Priority Matrix is somewhat similar to the Time Management Matrix, though it is used

Chapter 9 — Time Management 235