Your Sure Fire Strategy to Defeat the Time Wasters

We can categorize the things that come along to distract us into four main categories and these categories give us guidelines for how to handle them.

1. Do Now


2. Plan to Do


3. Resist and Stop, and


4. Reject

Here are some examples of the types of things that fall into each category.

1. 
   Do Now - Do now items are things that have deadlines and/or are really important.  And here we make a distinction between real emergencies and things that other people treat as emergencies.  There is a difference.  If the issue is one that can be responded to after twenty-four hours without any detriment to anyone physically, mentally, or financially it is not a true emergency.  And we have to be careful about this because many people who have time management issues will create emergencies by their lack of planning.  What we want to avoid is letting those people drag us into their self-made false crises.


2. 
   Plan to Do - Plan to do items are those that will help us get long-term projects done. These items include dedicated time for creative thought, planning, and strategizing.


3. 
   Resist and Stop - Resist and stop items can be considered things that seem relatively harmless but are bad habits and waste time.  Included in this list are things like gossiping and shopping when we really don’t need anything.  Curbing some of these habits, like unnecessary shopping and driving can actually help us manage our budgets as well.


4. 
   Reject - Reject items for most of us will include the imaginary emergencies that people like to dump in our laps and those tasks and routines that serve no purpose. For example, we need to ask ourselves how productive are we when we pull a report and spend time formatting it if the report serves to purpose and does not answer a legitimate business question.