Deploy Your Energies on Important, Immediate Assignments and Earn Better Grades
Have you ever noticed in your life that the times you were most productive were times when you had the least amount of time to spend, or a deadline to work to that you had to have a project or study finished by.
Do you find yourself “not” completing the work you’re supposed to do, when you have ample time to get it done yet when you’re giving yourself a time table and short sharp bursts of urgent timelines you excel above and beyond what you ever expected?
Here are some specific scenarios:
Not important and not urgent. At the end of the semester you need to hand in a book report. It will probably take at least 10 to 20 hours to read the whole book, and at least 4 or 5 hours to write the whole report. You have been given 3 months to complete it and it is worth at least 10% of your final grade.
Get to work as early as you can so you don’t end up rushing later on.
You really want to avoid letting an important task become an “urgent and important” task. You can easily avoid this type of situation by psychologically giving yourself one-fourth of the time to complete the task, which will result in a faster completion time. Therefore, allowing extra time so that you can review and “polish” the final product into something truly amazing.
Not important but urgent. There is a quiz tomorrow but you haven’t studied anything. It counts for 5% but you need every mark that is available.
You know perfectly well you could have done this sooner, and more easily, in between other tasks. Now, however, you need to worry about it unnecessarily.
You need to spend most of your time honing the skills you need more practice on, while still perfecting the strongest areas.
Important but not urgent. You have a project that is worth 35% of your final mark. It’s due in a month and you estimate it will take you 20-25 hours to complete.
Once you’ve broken it down into manageable pieces, it’s important to set a separate timeline and deadline for each piece, so that you have a really detailed and realistic plan for completing the project. This keeps your work stress-free, since you have set times when you can cool off and set times to focus on each bit of work.
Important and urgent. You have a final exam in two days, it’s worth 70% of your final grade. You haven’t put in enough time - there is so much new material to cover you don’t know where to start. Panic starts to set in.
This is a waste of your time. The best strategy is to focus the majority of your time on working on things that are important, but not urgent; the trick is to plan your time to make this possible. Sooner or later you will find this skill invaluable in all the aspects of your life.
The best way to handle these is firstly to take a step back from the situation, and look upon it from a “slower” more patient perspective Nothing is so urgent that you need to dive straight in without thinking, you need to do your due diligence in every situation, and that might only be 5 minutes of planning but at least you took a bit of time out and planned before you went ahead.
Once you get this fine balance right, and at the same time learn how to make the urgency “work for you” with especially the urgent projects and exams, you’ll truly have a formula that will see you through any exam, project or work related task you’ll ever need to complete.
Tags: Personal Development