WATCH: Brain Friendly Time Management: Helping your Brain to Prioritise (Ep3)
In this episode, I’d like to talk about “Brain Friendly Time Management” and ‘The Five Principles of How you can Improve your Productivity’.
Prioritisation
And this is about principle number two which is ‘Prioritisation’. When our brain knows what the priorities are, we can maintain our attention and our focus much more effectively. And we can avoid all the things that come from becoming stressed, or overwhelmed so we can focus on the outcomes we want to achieve and the rewards that come from that and that gives us dopamine and the ability to anticipate that reward and have the energy we need. So, it’s useful to look at this grid and to notice where you’re paying your attention or where you’re spending your time. And how you can begin to move into perhaps a more effective quadrant.
Time Focus
So, the grid is made up of ‘Time Focus’ across the top and ‘Outcome Focus’ down the sides. So, what we have here is we’ve got Urgent and Not urgent, and what we have here is Important and Not important. So, in this quadrant which is urgent and important, it’s stuff that we need to do. It has to be done. There’s a time-critical element and its outcome critical. However, we can easily get addicted to this zone by being there all the time and everything is urgent, everything is important and everything is a priority. And you know, if everything is a priority, well then, nothing’s a priority because prioritisation means that you’re able to actually put something first. And the things we need to be putting first are often actually not urgent, but they are important. Building relationships, planning, strategizing and making sure that things are happening that need to happen to avoid all of this urgency and last-minute stuff that needs to be done.
So, avoid procrastination and things like that. In this box, we get to dedicate and make a boundary around the time that’s dedicated to focusing on productivity and relatedness. Because ultimately, all of our productivity is about our relationships with other people. Once we know that we’re in this box we can then actually visit this if we need to, but quickly go back to this box because otherwise if we stick in here most of the time we’re just going to get stressed, it’s going to overwhelm our brain. With this box, we need to be delegating stuff and we need to avoid that completely because that’s just ineffective absorption of things like social media and stuff. And with this one, we need to make sure that we’re delegating as much as possible so that we don’t get endless distractions.
So, when it comes to Prioritisation…
Stay Curious!
With best regards,
David Klaasen
Talent4Performance help business leaders clarify complexity. We inspire people and drive continuous performance improvement, so they can convert thinking into action and results.
©David Klaasen – 2022
