On my last post, I mentioned the three possible actions that helped me to solve my 24 hours problem. Sometimes, those just don’t work too. In this case what should we do?
Priority revisited
After you listing all the activity or task you need to do, but you still feel that you don’t have enough time. It’s elimination time! We need to remove some of the things from our list. Because there are some of the items are, maybe, redundant or it’s just happened to be there.
There are some ways to help you eliminate some of them.
1. I Want vs I Need matrix,
We can draw two boxes, to help us to classify our activities. Do I need to do this? Or do I want to do it? There is big different between these two, which is impulsive behavior or not.
For example, sometimes I feel that I want to play games. It’s not related at all to anything, and once I started it, I barely feel that time flies while I’m into my game.
And in the end of the day, we will feel that we haven’t done anything. It’s simply because we focus too much on that “activity”.
This can be happened because a lot of things. Stress about work is one of them. But it also can happens because of other things, we need to aware about our own impulsive behavior.
2. Primary vs secondary role
Categorizing based on a primary or secondary role is another way of prioritizing.
For example, our role at home is as a children of our parents. We have duty to help them to do house chores, for example. So, when it comes to choosing watching movie for relaxing ourselves or moping the floor, we “should” do the primary responsibility first, which is moping the floor.
Another example is at work, let’s say my main role is a web developer. If my friend asked for a help on things that is not really related to my duty, I suppose to weigh whether my main duty has been completed or not before I decided to help my friend.
3. Inner vs outer
One more approach is by considering whether the activity will align with our personal goal or not. Are we doing it merely because we want to please other by sacrificing ourselves?
To sum up, I realized that it’s easier said than done. This happened to me many times, and it keeps testing me to keep practicing what I believe in, and as the old saying said, “practice makes perfect”. If this 24 hours thing is happened to you, what would you do?