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Neglect

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I recall that the standard mechanism for dealing with the breadth of assignments in university was to complain bitterly when they were assigned (with 3 weeks lead time), then to hang out in the pub until the night before they were due. The task then became one of getting the assignment done as expediently as possible, rather than to learn the concepts and truly gain from the experience. There was always time to try to learn the stuff before the final exam.

At least, that was the practice of the other students in the class…

The demands on our time are generally far greater today than they were back in school, and most of us are not much better at focusing on the tasks that are important before they become urgent simply due to the passage of time. We rarely make the distinction that Stephen Covey would recommend, pulling apart the urgency from the importance. We are caught up in the ‘tyranny of the urgent’, with our Pavlovian response to the notifications that we have new e-mail, dropping whatever we are working on when someone wanders by the office, or racing to pick up the phone before it goes to voice-mail.

Anything can serve to put off the task at hand. We are all guilty of procrastination at one time or another, whether it is because we loathe the job ahead, or we feel inadequate to perform the task. E-mail and the web are often more effective tools for procrastination rather than the communication tools that they were intended to be. Neglecting important tasks is frighteningly easy to do. It is the old alligators in the swamp you were sent to drain issue – we rarely set out with the intent to neglect issues, but we do little to guard them from being overcome by events.

Whether it is keeping tabs on the progress of the project, going through with the annual performance appraisals, or adequately testing the module we just coded before we check it back in, there are important tasks that we all must deal with every day. While putting them off or finding other things to do may not have an immediate impact, ignoring them can come back to bite us in a big way later. We constantly need to ensure we are spending enough time on these items, and let the lesser issues fill the cracks, rather than the other way around. To do this, we need to properly prioritize our work.

The first step is to capture everything we need to do in a single list – the mundane chores, the repetitive tasks, the novel activities and the large projects. Only when everything is on the table at the same time can we truly sort between them in terms of importance. Do away with the post-its on the side of your terminal, the lists you keep in your head, and all the other systems for remembering what to do – capture it all in a single place. Take the massive tasks, the ones that are too daunting as a single item, and break them down until they are manageable bites that will allow for gradual progress, rather than leaving them so large that they stay on a ‘back burner’ forever.

We need to be honest with ourselves to deal with neglect – the big problems rarely go away on their own, and our list of tasks will not shrink without effort on our part. While everything on the list will have a due date (whether it is a hard deadline or just intent), we separate the wheat from the chaff by clearly identifying the things that are critical to our success, differentiating from the things that wouldn’t be noticed if they weren’t done.

Set reasonable expectations as to how long it should take to complete each task, and you are gaining a valuable tool to manage where you should allocate your time. Learn from your own experience where you typically have spent your time, and the tool improves dramatically. Ruthlessly defend your right to spend some focused time on important matters, and you are well on your way to overcoming neglect.

With this approach, you will be equipped to spend more time on the things that are truly important to you, which in turn will improve your sense of accomplishment. You will have a clear understanding of your capabilities, and a strong position against the unreasonable requests by others for you to just take on one more thing.

Neglect is not a strategy for dealing with your workload. Chances are that simply organizing where you spend your time can reap huge benefits in overall productivity and job satisfaction, and the best of all this is that you don’t need permission or corporate initiatives to make it happen. 

Jim Brosseau of Clarrus Consulting Group

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