Are you Running a LIFO Time Management Strategy? How Bad Is It?

Do you do what I do? I suspect a lot of us do. With me it’s not just what’s urgent or important, but also what’s on the screen, which window is in the forefront, and what just happened.

It’s like urgent vs. important vs. recent. With a distortion filter for fun, or interesting.

The title of this post comes from basic accounting, handling inventory for accounting purposes as either last in first out (LIFO) or first-in first-out (FIFO). Lately I’ve been doing extreme LIFO. And I’m not sure that’s good.

Urgent vs. Important. It’s a really old paradigm, right? I bet you’ve been aware of it forever. I think most people identity author Steven Covey with bet you’ve heard of the problem of confusing urgency with importance. The video here puts it clearly in just a couple of minutes, so I decided to include it with this post.

YouTube video

But that’s not what really happens with me. I’m grateful for what seems like a problem. I’m involved with a lot of interesting things … my flagship company that I founded, business planning, social media, blogging, and lately I’ve had a kick with video editing. My days are easy to fill.

But damn. Every so often I pull my head up out of the immediate and look at what I’m doing and it’s disorganized, not prioritized, kind of fun but not as productive as it could be. I have no discipline about what’s the next thing I do. It might not be either urgent or important; it might just be there. I do whatever is fun or interesting, or just came in.

Is that what you do?

Comments

  • Shenoi says:

    It is important to realize that time management should actually help an individual become more efficient in the way time is used. I always analyze my schedule, responsibilities and daily tasks. I have tried many personal time scheduling software programs that allow to keep a calendar and to-do lists. Out of all, time recording software from Replicon ( http://www.replicon.com/olp/online-time-recording-software.aspx ) has worked efficiently.

  • igostartup says:

    An important factor in effective time management is planning your available time. You should create a schedule that will keep you alert, also reduces your anxiety or stress to complete the task. This assumes that you know and understand the factors that affect (and reduce) your time. Here are the steps to plan your time:
    -Plan your tasks, which you have already prioritized, ahead of time
    -Ensure for extra time in the event of disruptions that may cause delays
    -Provide additional time to deal with unexpected events
    For more information that can help you please visit our website http://igostartup.com

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