Habit 3 – Personal Management
Habit 3 – First things first is about personal management which helps us with how we can reach our destination (i.e. execution to reach our goals).
As we continue with the journey through the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People we covered
- Habit 1 – Be Proactive which says that we can choose our actions and can act.
- Habit 2 – Start with the end in mind which helps us with personal leadership and figuring out what is important to us and how to define our destination.
We will now cover Habit 3 – First things first.
Focus on the important, not urgent
I’ve written in a previous blog article about the table below. The basic concepts are
- Strategic progress is achieved primarily through region #2, let’s call it the “Effective” region. These are the things that take a while to do, that when we do them, make a large impact. For example, improving our product development process or quality process. They are hard because they deal with delayed gratification and require sustained effort.
- Region 1 is the the day to day emergencies and things we deal with. They maintain things but are of low value to strategic progress. They are fun because we get quick gratification, require short attention, and are simple to plan and execute.
- Region 3,4 are time wasters where we spend our time because they are pleasurable or we falsely believe we need to spend time on them. These are to be reduced and avoided.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | 1 | 2 (Goal) “Effective” |
| Not Important | 3 | 4 |
I recently did a review of my “Not Important” row and decided to stop watching entertainment video and read the news for 1 month. It was an interesting experiment that yielded some unexpected insights.
Execution Planning
We want to execute in smallish chunks of time for the most effective outcome. You probably have heard of Toyota’s concept of creating things in small batches and how successful it is. That is because they actually produce product and can quickly adjust. The same thing, it turns out, applies to executing and spending time.
Daily
Daily planning is looking at our list of things we want to do and seeing what things we can accomplish today. Its an important part of executing because each day is usually different and looking ahead to our day is important to make the most of it.
By definition, daily planning is short term, for one day. Its best suited for region #1 and handling urgent tasks so is very limited
Weekly
Weekly planning is the next step up. A week is a longer period of time where we can make progress on region 2, the “Effective” region (Important/Not Urgent). Planning for a week allows us to focus on strategic long term goals and make progress there.
The 7 Habits suggests to look at all our roles in life and choose 1 to 2 goals in each role to focus on. For example we can choose 1 goal for our individual role like exercise, 1 goal in our family role like working on a project with the kids, 1 goal as a manager to improve planning, and so forth.
In this way we are balanced in how we make progress in the roles that are important to us as we’ve seen that they are interdependent. I.e. our individual role with a goal to be healthy impacts all our other roles.
Weekly planning is very effective because its large enough for us to make progress on strategic items and small enough that we can plan it well at the start of of each week. Remember the Toyota system of small batches?
There is a practice called Agile/Scrum for software development that has used this concept for 30+ years with great success. A lot of new business processes that are successful have also used this approach. This is a very well proven mechanism.
Time Blocking For Important/Not Urgent
If you think about it, most people use calendars to scheduled things. We typically put meetings in our calendar and events that we want to attend. Calendars are used for meetings and events because we don’t want to forget about them and they are fixed in time. I.e. in order to get people in one place at the same time, the time has to be fixed.
Our tasks on the other hand are fluid and in our control, and hence we do not reserve time for them on our calendar because we don’t have to. We quickly learn that not reserving time results in that time being used for various things but not strategic progress.
Reserving time for the Effective region (Important/Not Urgent) is critical in order to make progress on those items. I naturally started doing this because things were not working for me without it. You may have also experienced this with some types of work like software development. The goal in those teams is NOT to have meetings because that work is very focused on region #2 and requires reserved time to make progress.
So now that we have planned our goals for the week and we allocated time to focus on those goals, we can look at our calendar and create events for certain days where we are focusing on the Effective region #2. We mark those events as busy so that we don’t get invited to meetings (i.e. the time is really allocated to make progress) and during those times we focus on items and make progress on our weekly goals.
Focus
You’ve heard the saying that you really need to focus on something to do it well. It turns out it’s a critical thing to do and actually easier to do in small time chunks.
We’ve talked about focusing by day and by week. When working on weekly goals its important to keep those goals stable and not change them until the end of the week. It’s often tempting to change course midweek but doing so will increase the difficulty of making progress at all. Imagine if every few hours you decided to do something different than you originally planned at the start of the week. How far would you get by the end of the week on your goals?
Focus by the hour
I’m learning that one of the important things is to focus by the hour as well. You may have heard of a method called “Pomodoro“. A Pomodoro is a period of about 25 minutes where you focus all your attention on one thing, then take a quick break, and repeat. Then after 4 Pomodoros, take a longer break. During an interval, you are NOT checking news websites, talking to anyone, or doing anything else except focusing on the thing you are working on.
The technique is based on several facts. Context switching (like reading news sites, or being interrupted by people) is inefficient. Don’t get me wrong, personal relationships are super important, but pausing interactions while you focus for a short period of time is much more effective. It takes time to get off a previous topic and onto another one. Additionally our brain is like a muscle. Its good working intensely for a period of time, and then needs rest. We can train our brain to do more, just like our muscles, but we need to rest between exercises to do our best or we’ll get sore.
I’m sure you’ve experienced the mental exhaustion that you feel after trying to focus for a long time on something.
Reviewing and planning the next week
At the end of the week we can look back and review how things went. We can look at any new information we’ve learned, and we can decide our next goals for the following week.
Its important to reflect and learn each week because its expected that we will make mistakes (its how learning works) and learning from those mistakes is key to constant improvement and being effective.
Automating Time Blocking
The practice of time blocking, (i.e. reserving time), for the “Effective” region is critical in order to make progress yet it can get tedious because current tools were primarily designed for shared, fixed in time things (i.e. meetings and events). There are some tools starting to become available that address this area but its very sparse.
We, at Yomez, have been working on this area to develop a tool that works better with existing calendars and other tools to make time blocking easier. You can learn more about it here.
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