Friday, May 19, 2006

A simple matter of time

I am doing a hundred different things. Playing Frizbee. Playing the violin. A fairly rigorous MBA program. A hectic fulltime job that takes up more than its fair share on any given day. A social circle comprised of friends in the area. A preschooler that loves to talk. A 3-month old who is learning to demand attention. Maintaining the cars. Paying the bills. Doing stuff around the house (very rarely these days). Reading books. Talking to people. Keeping tabs on technology. Blogging. Reading blogs. Staying in touch with family, old friends, new friends. Jamming on wild start-up ideas with friends. Dispensing advice. You can see how things can get a little too crazy sometimes.

Was talking to a mentor at work this morning. He mentions something that I realize I have been doing kind of intuitively myself these days. Lets say something that needs to be done comes up. The brain gets to work right away. Prioritizing. Sizing it up. Categorizing it into a matrix: +Urgent +Important, +Urgent -Important, -Urgent +Important, -Urgent -Important. ++ gets all the attention. +- gets immediate quick and dirty response or none at all (depending on various factors, including how likely it is that the person will yell at me). -+ slides till death do us part. i.e. till it moves into ++. -- slides forever.

Some people use PDAs to do this. Some people use a notebook. Some people just remember everything. For a while, I've been using a mindmapping software called freemind. I'm not extraordinarily meticulous about it like the PDA types. I use it as a check-and-balance to assess how I'm doing at least once a day. It helps prevent things from falling through the cracks.

My problem is two-fold. One. I like to do things I'm passionate about first. Sometimes there are things in ++ that I dont feel passionate about. Kind of unfortunate. Like taxes, for which my passion level is zero. Zilch. Someone I know said that he picks up the task he hates the most from his TO DO list and does that first. That way, when he gets to the end of the day, the fun stuff is all that is left. Sounds promising enough. I just need to wrap my mind around it.

Second. I simply can't say 'No'. I have this nice guy syndrome, not that there is anything wrong with that. Though nice guys dont always finish last, you burn both credibility and efficiency in the bargain. Curiously, I find it easier to say no to some people than others. The art of saying 'No' when it matters is something I need to master.

Sigh! Gotto get back to stuff I hate. Meeting time. Ugh!

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