matt shelton

Important but not Urgent

I love to plan. Making lists, brainstorming, hypothesizing. I love it all. If I could design my perfect day, I wouldn’t do a single urgent thing. Rather, I’d spend the time getting done anything that I thought could become urgent in the near future. Everyone would think I was so completely on-top of my game that they’d probably hate me.

Well, just a little, anyway.

From the Time Management Matrix, the common set of Quadrant II activities include:

• Preparations
• Presentations
• Value Clarification
• Planning
• Relationship Building
• True Recreation
• Empowerment

An aside: I made an argument relationship building being a Quadrant IV activity, but other than that, this is a good list with my favorite “preparations” squarely at the top.

Ideally we should spend the majority of our time here in Quadrant II, handling activities that are important but have low urgency. This is wise; it serves to keep your deliverables and responsibilities from actually becoming urgent. Once something is urgent, you’re stuck. If you want to keep your job/family/life/etc., you have to do it NOW.

Taking care of that looming task when it’s still in Quadrant II (or ideally, IV) empowers you. It puts you squarely in charge of the tasks about which you are already aware. I don’t know if this is what is meant, in the list above, by “Empowerment”, or if that’s about empowering your delegates. I’ll go ahead and presume I’m right and it’s about empowering your own ability to do things in a particular order. If I’m wrong… meh.

I spoke about a previous life previously, in which I spent a vast majority of my time in Quadrant I. One of the most helpful things I ever did in that life was to shut my door for an entire day and re-plan absolutely every facet of the next week. I took the time to stop and plan how my week would follow, giving myself about 30-40% of my time to deal with all of those urgent and important activities that were bound to attack me as the week went on. It meant all of the difference to me in the world. David Allen talks about this a bunch in Getting Things Done, though he doesn’t explicitly link it to the TMM. The closest analogue is when he discusses task collection and the process of emptying one’s head. This is an interesting enough process that I’ll write about it another time. It has, recently, led to the creation of a few sets of goals and milestones, such as:

• A list of 101 things to accomplish in the next three years.
• A list of achievable work-related goals for myself for the year.
• A list of (hopefully) achievable goals for my team for the year.

The point of all of this is simple – make the time to take the time to plan at least enough to get you through the next short period of time. A proper plan (or at least a proper set of goals) gives you the flexibility to adjust your workload as you encounter the more urgent tasks along the way. This is what I meant when I started to talk about breaking down your list of projects into smaller, quickly completed, tasks. That, at the core, is what GTD is all about, for me anyway. I’ve read posts by several other users of the GTD methodology who center on an important concept – Getting Things Done is about finding the best possible framework for you to get said things done efficiently with overall lower stress. Each person is different, so any blanket approach will fail some of the time.

..as much as I want to think otherwise, blogging will always be a Quadrant IV activity. I suppose that, until someone wants to pay me to do so (who would ever want to do that??), it’s smart that it remains something I do with bits of free time.

Urgent but Not Important

Lennon said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

He could have been talking about the Time Management Matrix when he said this. I’m nearly certain that he wasn’t, but his quote is no less applicable. Life happens in and around every single plan you’ve made. It does not matter how much you plan, something else will happen at some point.

“Life” happens: The phone rings. Email arrives. A knock at the door.

Each is an urgent activity that, while bearing some small level of importance, is not important in the grand scheme of things. It must, however, be attended to NOW. This is life and we must grin and bear it.

There are a few strategies for dealing with an interrupt-driven life, but the most effective one (in my experience) boils down to being as flexible as you can with a set of tasks that are each as short as possible. If all of the things you need to do have a short duration, then each interruption doesn’t skew your ability to get work done at any given time. One trick to doing this effectively, about which I’ll blog another timE, is the philosophy of GTD, on which David Allen makes a living training folks.

The natural path for a Quadrant III activity is for it to end up in Quadrant I based solely on how its level of importance changes over time, determined by one of a few things:

• External Force (customer, supervisor, etc.)
• Internal Force (You decide it’s more important)
• Circumstance

On average, I find that my customers (both internal and external) determine the importance of any given activity. For instance, if I need to create a report about the number of wompums per minute that are completed by a given wompumator, this may seem to me to be of little importance, even if it’s needed soon. I’d prioritize it thusly and move on to activities of greater importance (Quadrant I). However, if the customer needs this report to be able to complete other, more important, activities, I may find it sliding down into Quadrant I and getting completed NOW as they call and demand ask that it be completed now. This is what I call external re-prioritization. The remainder of these activities are internally prioritized – I determine that they are important enough to be completed now.

On an average day in a previous work life, I was interrupted about thirty times, each for a need that varied in importance, but was almost always urgent. I spent nearly 80% of my time working in Quadrant 3/1 (a set of activities that aren’t that important in the grand scheme, but are VERY important to someone else, so they end up being done now). That type of work moves in the direction of burnout quickly, and realizing that I was digging a shallow grave for my career was the first step to manging what time I have more effectively.

The other option is to work multiple 10+ hour days to stay ahead. Don’t do that.

Several years ago I was required to take a two-week seminar on Steven Covey’s 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. I’ve forgotten almost all of it, which is what happens when you don’t put something into practice and stick with it. Nonetheless, there were a few key points that come back to haunt me now and again.

My company gives managers quarterly training on management technique, skills and habits. Covey would call this “Sharpening the Saw”, which is Habit 7. I find these sessions to be incredibly helpful and am very thankful that we spend so much time working to improve ourselves. In one particular session in mid-2006 we spent half of the day discussing time management and Covey’s groovy Time Management Matrix. The matrix breaks down all of the responsibilities and tasks which we must do into four areas, defined by two critieria, Importance and Urgency:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important, Not Urgent
3. Not Important, Urgent
4. Not Important, Not Urgent

Each time I was trained on this topic the trainer would ask us how much time we spend in each quadrant now before telling us how much time they thought we should spend. Invariably, every single participant was spending way too much time in Quadrant I. Each time I completed this exercise I was in a Technical Support role so my Quadrant I number was around 50%, which is sickeningly unhealthy. I won’t post what the actual values should be… you should pursue Covey training if you’re interested!

The instructive premise is simple: If you don’t take the time to do the things that are not yet urgent or not yet important, they will become both at some point. In tech support, everything is urgent in the eyes of your customer, so you constantly feel like you are operating in crisis mode. For adrenaline junkies, this works very well, and explains why I have loved such roles during my career. For everyone else, they burn out.

I really like the time management matrix – it reminds me that every single task falls into one category and should be given a certain amount of time based on that. It’s an easy rule that removes (some) stress from planning one’s day/week/month/life.

I am going to write a few posts in the coming weeks about each quadrant and what I’ve found helps me to both keep things in their respective places as well as keep me as sane as possible while managing these tasks.

The image above was mirrored from www.careerdevelopmentplan.net. I didn’t ask to use it, rather I found it in a Google Image Search, so if they are annoyed and would like me to refrain from using it, my email address is readily available.

The next step in this project was to visualize the future case – where should my data reside in working form and in archive form. Then, I had to figure out what’s feasible now and what’s feasible down the line. I can’t just go out and buy a 4 TB NAS, though that thought has crossed my mind several times, and really, that still leaves something I have to go grab in the case of a fire. (Still, it’s not a bad idea for the future.)

Another thought is that I might want a hard backup available at a secure, physical location – A bank’s safety deposit box, or a family member’s house, perhaps. If I had a blu-ray or HD-DVD burner, and could afford to have a stack of said media lying around, or if I felt like dropping money on a REV drive and its media, then perhaps that would be an easy solution. As it stands, my only option would be to burn 2-3 Dual-Layer DVDs (or one Blu-Ray) every 3-4 months and mail it to someone’s house. Maybe there’s another one out there, but that will require some investigation. I do not want to buy a set of external drives and ship them around. On the other hand, I do have two 60 Gb IDE drives sitting in the basement doing absolutely nothing, so maybe that’s _not_ a bad option.

This is what I came up with:

To get to Initial Result, the following should be accomplished:

1. Evaluate online backup options, which seem to be:
   • mozy.com
   • JungleDisk or some other client that uses Amazon’s S3 service.
2. Install a large SATA drive (>= 300gb) for my workstation (at work) for my music and possible offsite SVN mirror.
3. Investigate other offsite SVN mirror locations (family? cheap web hosting?)
4. Get my local SVN repository in order. It’s in pretty good shape but it can’t hurt to re-think the structure a tad. Add a tree for installation media disk images.
5. Convert all DVD and CD media to their respective disk image formats and checked into the SVN repository.
6. Set up the HDD at work and rsync my data over. It might be smart to do this locally first since that’s a LOT of data.
7. Set up the offsite SVN repository and mirror my repository at home. Create a cron job to do it automatically every night. This shouldn’t take too much bandwidth after the initial load since I shouldn’t be messing with it too much.
8. Scan all of my really important, hard-copy files into PDFs and add them to the Documents tree in my backups.

To get there, I needed to purchase:

1. A subscription to the online service of my choice:
   • mozy.com is about $54 per year, though if I sign up for 2 years, I get 3 months free.
   • The JungleDisk client is $20, and Amazon’s S3 service is use-based, which also should translate to about $5/month.
2. A large SATA drive. (TigerDirect FTW!)

Overall, what I came up with is not too bad. Some of the tasks, as they are planned now, looked to take a lot of time, but in the end, what they will save me in stress, anguish, annoyance and time spend re-building everything is invaluable.

After even more thinking about this, that last task of scanning important documents seemed a bit out of scope for this project, and I’ll pick it up some other time. Suffice it to say that would take a LOT more time than anything else, and I also have a job and a wife.

Home Backup Project – Part 1: Identify the Problem