Thanks for bringing up the quadrants. I’ve been aware of them but feel like I haven’t been using them optimally to figure out how to best focus my time and energy. Somehow I didn’t realize important/non-urgent was the primary one to focus on…
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I’ve been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.
Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management: testprepchampions.com/…/4quadrantstimemanagement-…
You’re supposed to work mostly in the “Important Non-Urgent” quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the “Not Important, Not Urgent” which is the worst quadrant to be working in.
In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you’re doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the “Important and Urgent” quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the “Non-Important, Non-Urgent” quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.
So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:
- Calls to my phone for work subjects outside work always (this is important) get a “I’ll talk to you when I’m back at work”. You have to inflexibly refuse to handle work stuff outside work otherwise the number of work calls will just creep up. Also do it from the very start of a new job: your work colleagues need to be trained to expect that from you and you need to provide them with an actual positive out (i.e. “I’ll talk to you when I’m back at work” and actually do it). If an employer needs you to provided out of hours support, that has to be in the contract and there has to be a work phone just for that which will be ON during the hours contracted for that and OFF otherwise.
- Call to my phone for work subjects during work time get triaged and non-urgent or non-important stuff get’s back a “I’m busy now, I’ll talk to you about this when I have the time” if I indeed have something more important or urgent on the plate. Again, train your colleagues to expect that if they call you with non-urgent or non-important stuff there you will not be giving them that sweet feeling of having dumped the problem on somebody else - the objective here is not to “deny service”, it’s to as much as possible have other people do the triaging for you so that you’re only interrupted by things which are worth it.
- E-mail is for non-urgent stuff: when I have the time I’ll look into it. On my phone E-mail arrival notifications will be turned off. Again, work colleagues need to be trained by you to expect exactly that from you. Be organised yourself and have regular “check e-mail” times - this is part of getting other people do the triaging for you.
- All application notifications default to OFF. Very few ever get turned ON and if they abuse it they get turned OFF on the settings. The sending of a notification by an application is a choice of whomever is the maker of the app, hence follows their choices and generally serves their purposes, which means that most application notifications are in some way or another a marketing choice, either directly some kind of sales pitch or indirectly to “remind you of that app”, which means they’re most definitelly neither urgent nor important. Only a handfull of applications deserve to have notification enabled IMHO, and sometimes even some of those abuse that and stop deservings it.
TL;DR - Triage things so that you’re as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they’re not urgent, go from potential problem into “Oh, shit everything is burning!”). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don’t promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of “I’m busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I’ll look into it when I have the time”), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Well, as /u/joel_feila@lemmy.world pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that’s what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one’s time is to make sure one doesn’t miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one’s work).
However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one’s half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.
In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets to priority, Non-Important is what you do when there’s nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
That is pretty much how I feel - like I’m putting out the fires every day, but not actually progressing on what I want or plan to do. It’s a tough balancing act that I’m still trying to figure out… time management is a tough skill to learn when it doesn’t come easily or naturally.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Yeah, that stuff it’s pretty hard to learn and it’s worse when you’ve never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of thing you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time and problems (which in turn, are also time when you’re the one that has to fix them) later, but only after you’ve seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify doing them to others because you’ve seen them actually work).
I was luck that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and the results of it, gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which until then I though were “the way everybody works in this area”.
blazeknave@lemmy.world 4 days ago
7 Habits?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.
Let’s just say she was a lousy manager.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Mostly workong in the important but not urgent. Ill let the er staff know that. Lol
Joking aside i do get it most of the time things sould not get to the urgent and important box.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.
If you don’t have “thinking things through” and “maintenance/tweaking” time you’re going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don’t have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.
To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a “constant urgent firefighting mode” to a “mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while”: making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I’m finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I’m keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren’t expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there’s a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.
As I’ve written somewhere else, I’ve actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to use needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.
IMHO, the process works, and I believe that’s the merit of the process rather than being a “me” thing.
itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
This is interesting because I very deliberately try the opposite. My top priority is always making time for helping colleagues. Most of my industry is super green and the young staff require a lot of training/attention if you want them to develop well/quickly. It means when I first started my team things were a bit hectic, but years later it basically runs itself. I always prioritize investing in individuals so that when things pile up I’ve got 20 people I can delegate to. What’s more, this is cultural at this point so they all do the same. It’s basically a positive feedback loop at this point where things just sort of work cause everyone knows what they’re doing.
There is another team next to mine that is run a lot like how you’re describing and they are constantly missing schedules/going over budget/having quality issues cause the lead ‘doesnt have time right now’. Except right now is all the time and none of the staff seem to know what they’re doing and are all super frustrated.
Anyway, all that to say I think how you structure these kinds of things depends a lot on what kind of work you do, what kind of team environment you have, and what your overall goals are. Could I be individually more productive if I told everyone else to go away? Absolutely yes, I’d get 3 times as much done, but the team overall would be less efficient.
I also don’t work outside work hours, and neither does anyone else on my team because we’re efficient enough at work to plan out and execute 40 hours of work per person per week. The same can’t be said for that other team where the lead goes home and everyone else is left confused working crazy OT.
Your way seems to work for you, but I think it is important to note that there is no ‘right’ approach for all situations. One needs to define the objectives and then determine what the best approach for accomplishing those might be for that particular role. In short, it’s complicated. And anyone who says it’s not is generally trying to sell something
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I did that when I started (I am, modesty on the side, a natural at what I do for work) and the result was that I became the top problem-solver of my team and over time I had more and more load from people bringing me their problems whilst still being expected to do the formally allocated work, with the end result that when I left that job I was working very long hours, always tired and my productivity had plummeted.
What was happenning there was that, because of me always saying “yes, I’ll help you” with zero pushback, I became the easiest path for people in my team to quickly solve their problems, and that was including problems they could solve themselves. Also my effectiveness at doing anything fell massivelly because whatever I was doing, in the middle of it I would be interrupted (which has quite the cognitive cost due to interruption of the mental state of Flow and “mental context switching”) and if I immediatelly went into solving that new problem I would likely be interrupted at that too (leading to multiple things hanging half-way to done and making my delivery speed overall worse), and even if I wasn’t interrupted serving the latest interruption the mere “stop this task, do something else equally complex, then get back to the original task” increased the probability of mistakes in the original task because of the possibility of losing track of important details of the work I was doing in it.
Human beings are naturally lazy (myself included) and if, because you offer no pushback, coming to you with any problem is easier and faster than trying to figure it out themselves, people will tend come to you with their problems before properly after little or no effort to solve it themselves, which might be doable (though not good for them or for you) if it’s only one or two people, but not when it’s more than that.
If only to avoid becoming the minimum-effort-path for everybody else and/or having your efficiency drop because of not enough single-task focus and too much context switching (and the entire team’s efficiency fall compared to them solving all the problem they can solve themselves), you have to do some pushing back.
You aren’t hired to do the work of others and neither are you hired to underperform because you’re in constant firefighting mode even for things which are unimportant or not really burning, so immediate response to any demand on your time from somebody else is pretty much the most amateurish, least professional way to do your work for anybody which is not a junior-level professional.
That said, if you’re lucky enough to be in a situation were you empowering others to work better is recognized and desired or, even better, you’re expected to and have officially time to be a mentor, then you can relax the pushing back: you still should triage the urgency of your response to things to match their actual urgency - that’s just basic competence at organising your time and work - but you can now when approached by somebody with a problem dedicate some time to teach people to help themselves (literally have them sit down and explain how to diagnose and fix it whilst they do it themselves) both so that they don’t constantly come you with simple problems (which isn’t really the value added stuff you’re being paid a Senior level professional cost to do) and for them to grow as professionals, and if you’re mentoring you’ll want to go further and periodically sit with the junior types and do overviews of things or help them out in planning how to tackle a complex thing they’re about to start.
Still, in all this, you have to plan your time and triage access to you time based on urgency and importance in order to mantain good performance and actually deliver results in a predictable way, So as to best fits the needs of your employer: for any employee beyond junior level, good time management (which includes the priority of your response to queries and problems match the importance and real urgence of them) is just simple professional competence and since the triaging itself is a time cost (quite a big one if it breaks you out of Flow and forces a mental context switch), you want it done in the most effective way as possible and by the more well informed about the important and urgency of the situation as possible, which means most of it should be done upstream and before getting to you.