Manage your time better by dividing tasks into four categories:
1. Direct value. High priorities: making a sale, presenting to your staff, writing a report
2. Indirect value. What pays off later: learning new skills, setting goals
3. Necessary non-value. Things you must do that have no value for you: filling out government forms, taking many phone calls
4. Unnecessary non-value. These include things such as writing routine reports that co-workers no longer read
How to categorize:
* Log your daily activities for at least one week. Review what you did and classify each activity according to the value definitions
* List the most important internal and external customers who should get most of your attention. Then compare your list and your log
* Determine how much high-value work you think you’re doing for your most important customers
* Ask those customers to tell you which of your activities they consider to have the highest value for them
* Use what you learn to plan your days, weeks and months around the high-value activities those customers have identified
As adapted from Communications Briefing with permission.
Source: Larry Hart, writing in Atlanta Business Chronicle,
1801 Peachtree St., Atlanta, GA 30309