The project manager asked: How can I do anything I can't do?-The event basket method

How to manage your time

Original article, if reproduced, please indicate the source: http://blog.csdn.net/yihui823/article/details/6826353

Time management is an art. Time is the most equitable, and everyone's time is the same. How to make different careers at the same time is a manifestation of the individual's level.

I. Story

Here is a story. The story is copied. I modified some of the stories to bring them closer to the theme I want to talk about.

There were two monks who lived in the temple on two adjacent mountains. There are thin monks on the left and fat monks on the right. There is a creek between the two mountains, so the two monks go down the hill to pick water at the same time every day. Over time, they become good friends. Both monks like swimming. When a fat monk often picks up water, he can swim for a while, but the thin monk rarely swim in the stream.

Unconsciously, five years have passed. One day, the thin monk did not bring a pole to pick up water, but directly swim in the creek. The fat monk wondered, and asked the thin Monk, how can you drink water if you don't pick water today. The slim monk said that in the past five years, I have spent some time digging a well behind the temple after I finish my homework every day. Even if I am sometimes very busy, I can dig as much as I can. Now that I have finally dug out the well water, I don't have to go down the hill to pick up the water. Now I can swim safely.

As a result, every day thin and still can swim freely, and the fat monk can only swim for a while, you have to pick the water back to the temple. One day, two temples caught fire at the same time. The thin monk soon used the well water to put out the fire. The fat monk had to go to the creek to pick up water to extinguish the fire. As a result, the temple had burned more than half of the fire.

Next, in addition to arranging time to pick up water, the fat monk will spend most of his time repairing the temple. While the thin monk is swimming, he is still concentrating on painting and calligraphy. The story is complete.

Ii. Importance/urgency

After the story is over, let's analyze the sequence of tasks.

It is a very common method to differentiate events based on importance and urgency. But what is important and what is urgent?

Important: things that will have a significant impact on future work and life, and future development, and things that will significantly promote the achievement of the target.

Urgent: something that needs to be handled immediately.

 

The importance and urgency of the event are described based on the Quadrant diagram above.

4: It is not important or urgent.

That is, it will not have an important impact in the future, and it is not something that needs to be handled immediately. Similar to a monk's swimming. Such things are usually interests, people-dependent, or accidental ideas.

3: urgent and unimportant events

It only needs to be handled immediately, but it does not have any important impact on the future. It is similar to a monk's pick-up. It must be done every day. If it is not done, it is done to solve the current problem.

2: Important and Urgent Matters

It is not something that must be handled immediately, but it will have a profound impact in the future. Similar to a thin Monk, it's okay if you do not dig a well, but once the digging is successful, you can leave it alone. If there are clear goals, such things can be of obvious help to achieve the goal.

1: Important and Urgent Matters

Currently, it must be processed. If it is not processed, it will immediately cause serious consequences. Similar to the monk's temple fire, there is no place to live without immediate fire.

Iii. Classification

How can we handle the above four types of events separately?

Obviously, the best thing to do first is to do important and urgent tasks. I think everyone knows this. In addition, such events are generally easily identified and are not feasible, and people will not forget them.

However, not all events are important and urgent. Important emergencies are generally fire-fighting events, that is, they are caused by poor work or accidents. In our normal work, we are full of three other types of events. How should we allocate time?

Obviously, do not do anything that is not urgent or important. However, this is easy to say but not easy to do. Since such events are listed, they will be tempting. For example, many people like watching TV, playing games, and reading novels. Even at work, this kind of things is also a favorite of everyone. Many project managers will arrange their own coding, because of their technical origins, they tend to like coding. Therefore, such things need to be restrained, and be sure to restrain yourself from the impulse to do things that are not important or urgent.

So what should we do for the remaining 2 and 3?

It is common and normal to understand that emergency is not important first, but important is not urgent.

Frankly speaking, this idea is also quite normal. Since the incident is urgent, I need to deal with it right away. Important and Urgent. Please wait for time.

Actually, it is quite different!

Urgent and unimportant tasks usually involve daily work, or work that is helpful to others, which is easy to do and has a short cycle, which will not have much impact on the future. That is to say, if you do the best, it will not affect you if you do not do it. However, important and non-urgent things are generally things that will affect the future. Such things are often unwilling to do, long cycles, and difficult to do.

For example. There are many new members in the project team. The project manager needs to organize a copy of technical training materials to provide centralized training for new people. This is important and not urgent. When new people encounter problems, they come directly to the project manager for help. The project manager needs to help them solve the problems, which is urgent and unimportant.

If the project manager frequently interrupts things at hand to help new people solve problems, the technical training materials will be delayed, and new people's problems will emerge one after another. This is a vicious circle.

If the project manager is able to extract training materials and try to get training done as soon as possible, the problem will gradually decrease. This is a virtuous circle.

There is also a more vivid example. If you are taking a bath, it's full of bubbles. At this time, I heard a call. Answering the phone is urgent and unimportant. If you do, the result is that the soap bubbles in the ground are to be cleaned, resulting in a bunch of urgent and unimportant events.

Therefore, if you want to control your time, the most important thing you need to do is:

Important and not urgent

This type of events is long and difficult, so it takes a long time to stick to it. This is the root cause of the problem.

Iv. Suspicious Points Analysis

Many people will say that it is easy to say. Let's analyze several questions.

1. Emergency and unimportant things emerge in an endless stream. What should I do?

Let's use the example above. If new people have problems, I can't leave it alone.

In fact, even if you don't immediately help them solve the problem, they are just depressed for a while. In this case, they can first sort out all the problems and try to solve them by themselves. Then, within a fixed period of time (for example, between two o'clock P.M. and every day), you can help them solve the problem. You can also share the problem solving tasks with several other technical experts in the project.

2. There is always no motivation to do things that can't be done at once.

Such events generally do not immediately take effect. A long-term plan needs to be developed and a fixed schedule is arranged every day. No matter how much it is, make sure that every day there is progress.

3. I don't have time to do what I like to do.

Believe me, you only need to complete important and non-urgent tasks, so that you can spend more time doing what you like. When the thin monk has successfully dug a well, more time will be spent swimming.

4. Do not do important or urgent things.

Fire prevention and fire fighting concepts. If we only do the current thing well and do the urgent and unimportant things well every day, then once an accident occurs, it will cause more serious consequences and future things will become important and urgent. If you don't put your time in your hands, you will be in the fire-fighting status every day.

5. handling process

In the past, there was a way to list all the tasks to be done every morning, and then sort out the work every night to see what was done and what was not done. Nowadays, the information society faces a lot of temporary events every day. Therefore, we can now use the "event basket" method.

Now, prepare a basket ". This basket can be a notebook or a small software. The author uses the "task" tool of outlook, which can be synchronized with the Windows Mobile Phone. The same is true for other tools.

Once you receive a task or discover the event you want to handle, you should first throw it into the "event basket. This is like sending a message to a message queue During encoding. It is not processed synchronously, that is, it is not processed immediately, and it is not processed immediately.

After the event is thrown in, determine whether the event is "Important and Urgent ". If the boss calls you, or an important emergency such as a fire in the factory, immediately put down your work and handle it.

If it is not an "important urgent" task, let it stay in the "event basket" for a while and focus on what you are dealing.

After finishing the current event, review your event basket. If there are other unknown events, identify them and identify them with importance. Then, let's see if your important and non-urgent events have been handled. If they are not handled, priority should be given to important and non-urgent events.

For example, every week, we review our event baskets and re-Identify the importance and urgency of each event.

6. Poor experience and good memory

Do not think that your brain is so cruel that more things will surely be lost. Setting up a reasonable reminder mechanism to remind you of regular meetings and other things will reduce your psychological burden.

Do not do two things at the same time

Do not treat yourself as a CPU. If you do two things at the same time, none of them can be done well. After completing one task, go to other tasks. Do not always interrupt your work. If you do not immediately handle some things, there will be no harm.

Find out what is "important and not urgent"

Many people who need to be pushed away cannot find "Important and Urgent" things. For projects, we often identify risks, think about problems that may occur in the project, and prevent them in advance. This is an important and urgent task. Never let it develop with its own nature. When something goes wrong, it will be an "important emergency" event everywhere, and it will be exhausted.

Target Identification

The most important sign for identifying "important and not urgent" events is whether it is beneficial to the ultimate goal. Ambitious goals are always greater than immediate goals. If you are only looking at your current goals, you will never find anything important or urgent, or you will never find anything wrong.