Global Leadership Hub

 Self-management is defined by Google as the taking of responsibility for one’s own behaviour and well-being. Managers who can effectively manage themselves are destined for greatness – managers who need to be managed by somebody else probably don’t deserve the title. So, what are characteristics of good self-management? In this article we will take a closer look at one of them; planning your tasks.

In a management position, completing tasks within deadlines is vital (or actually just completing them. Full stop.). These days, a manager’s tasks are diverse and as everything in life, there are things we like to do and things we don’t like to do so much. Throughout my professional career, I wrote hundreds (if not thousands) of to-do list. I finally realised that the unwanted tasks always remained at the bottom for weeks, months (or even years), whilst the tasks I loved doing never even managed to get onto the list as they were completed right away or without a reminder. My excuse was that I just never had time to get around to those nasty tasks. Either I was too busy, or it was too late to get started or I couldn’t concentrate after a long day etc. But those were exactly that – just excuses. When I got dangerously close to running out of excuses, I had to top up my to-do list with more urgent (not more important) tasks, so (un)fortunately the nastiest ended up at the bottom again.

My piece of advice: keep your to-do-list simple, because it is just a tool to get to your outcomes faster. Don’t spend valuable time making them pretty or constantly re-writing them, or else you risk wasting your time rather than investing it wisely. Writing to-do-lists can be like riding a rocking horse: keeping you busy while not making any progress.

“The successful person has the habit
of doing the things failures don’t like to do.
They don’t like doing them either necessarily.
But their disliking is subordinated to
the strength of their purpose.”
~ E. M. Gray

I got myself in time-management trouble too often before I realised and truly understood that prioritising is all about getting organised and actually performing the tasks that are important! It is a phenomenon how obsessed we all are with time, and the fact that we perceive time as precious means that we need to stop time from managing us. We need to manage time, or even better; manage ourselves, better. We all have 24 hours per day, whether we like it or not. Often, we are caught up in busyness and feel stressed. We use sentences like: “I have no time”, “I ran out of time” or “I need more time”. How well you use your 24 hours per day mainly depends on your skills, planning, strategies, evaluation and SELF-CONTROL.

Time cannot be managed – Time is an investment

Not everything we do truly matters. Too many little tasks that are blaring at us every single day appear to be urgent but are in fact unimportant and distract us from what is more important. Therefore, we must learn to prioritise, let go of things that we can’t control and invest that time in the things we can control. 

“Life is what happens to you 
while you’re busy making other plans.” 
~ John Lennon

To be more productive and to achieve better outcomes, prioritise your tasks according to Importance and Urgency, rather than in the order of personal preference.

First of all, we need to realise that we are spending all our time (work and leisure) within what Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” calls the 4 task quadrants: 1) Urgent and important; 2) Important not urgent; 3) Urgent not important; and 4) Not important not urgent.  

The quadrant we choose will determine our outcome. For example, if we spend most of our time in quadrant 4 (doing things that are not important and not urgent), we certainly will end up in chaos and it is only a matter of time until our operational processes will collapse. This could for example mean that we ‘hide’ behind our desk writing and rewriting to-do-lists without actually ever achieving much, because we are not willing to tackle the real challenges (procrastination – at effect) we face in our position.

Versus spending most of our time in quadrants 1 and 2 (doing things that are urgent and important, and important not urgent), and keeping up to date with demands from managers, team members, casuals, suppliers, finance and regulatory requirement, just to mention a few.