by Joseph Wardy

Created on: November 06, 2009

People waste time to work not because of laziness or milking the system. The time wasted is in the arena of confusing priorities by mixing being busy with productivity. Here are two examples:

1) Many people confuse urgency with priorities. An urgency is a " no brain" activity that occurs within the work day unplanned and unscheduled. A priority is a set task planned that is related to the employee's values and goals or a task that has consequences if not completed by the end of the day. Please allow me to give a personal example of confusing these two experiences when working as a Training Manager for the Japanese company Panasonic. I was working on a creative project of priority to me and my boss and was operating productively and with focus. Then, I received a phone call from a manager who asked for the number of training one of hisstaff members have attended. I stopped my project and then looked up the records of what this employee attended. Then I wrote this manager a note explained to him what the employee needed to complete in order to be on a management track. This request was an urgency that took me about 45 minutes to complete. When I returned to my creative project of priority, I lost my focus. Please keep in mind the following researched fact : It is not the interruption but the recovery from that interruption that results in lost productivity. The longer the interruption the greater are the chances of not recovering. These 45 minutes could have 1) been two minutes by taking the call and writing down the manager's request in my daily planner or 2) Not take the call and allow it to go on voice mail to pick up after my creative project ends. I confused urgency with priority wasting time ion the process.

2) A 'todo" list without prioritizing the importance of tasks generally results in wasting time in the busyness of quantity rather than the productivity of quality. employees without the ABC priority of A is critically important, B is important and C is menial do one two things : 1) complete the list in order or 2) look to complete the tasks they like to do first. Both practices waste time in that priority is not addressed.

Although the first one was of personal experience, both suggestions were based on research conducted. As a time management trainer for a major consulting firm, I shared these realities to hundreds of participants in the one day courses i delivered and facilitated!

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