I was reading an article in the morning by Bimal Balasingham, director of TATA AIG Insurance on time management in one of the leading dailies. Many aspects mentioned by Mr.Balasingham were quite obvious ones; nonetheless it was a good read as it brought these obvious things to conscious-level. The point mentioned on perfectionism was pretty neat. ‘Perfectionist’ folks have goals at each task that are virtually unattainable in a timely fashion, this obsession with perfection can many times lead to procrastination thus undelivered goods by end of the day.

From the article, one thing that I would like to act upon as part of my regular routine is planning every-day basis the following categorization, stack it up as a layer on top of Covey’s approach on 1 hour of planning every week.

• Important – Urgent
• Important – Not Urgent
• Urgent – Important
• Urgent – No Important

As I said earlier, these are not new to anyone of us, and might appear obvious. But the question is, how much do we really practice them in our day-to-day life?

Folks who have used Franklin Covey way of planning would be aware of the values/benefits behind 1 hour of planning every week. By marrying Covey’s and the aforesaid list, the weekly planned items can be populated in a quadrant comprising of the aforesaid headers and actioned upon basis the prioritization.

Once a weekly plan is done, it’s quite easy to distribute all the tasks into small daily-tasks and monitor at end of each day in a quadrant. Importantly, this will come in handy in chaotic environments, it’s easy to say NO to certain requests basis the plan and substantiate the NO (if need be) with appropriate rationale.

Having said all these, I am very sure the success is not guaranteed. Hey! But you can surely give it shot, if it works, Good! If not, you have nothing to lose.