Time Management: A powerful tool to show us where to spend our time.

I think it's important for us to feel like we are moving to a destination or a goal in our lives. The feeling of isolation or stagnation is not appealing over a long duration. Sure we hit points in our careers and our lives where we need to stop, reflect and recharge however over the span on our lives, a sense of direction and momentum is extremely important.

One problem I had as a people manager was when asking someone “what do you want to do?” It was such an open-ended question it was almost like a childhood essay I used to get tasked with that was along the lines of “write 1000 words on anything you want”. It usually ended up being on sharks but I don’t even really like sharks that much but there was heaps of content so sharks won.

I stumbled across a tool where I was presented with a simple grid. The grid was broken up into 4 quadrants.

The premise is this. We should spend our time doing what we ‘love’ and work to remove or reduce the time spent on the areas that you ‘hate’

I have run through this exercise with myself and found it extremely valuable as a tool to remind me where I should be spending my time. I have then attempted to use it as an exercise to run through with those I manage, and have had a great response. The idea is as follows…

Hate & are bad at.
The items in this quadrant could be for a variety of factors. It could be that you hate it because you are bad at it. Explore this and work to identify why do you think you are bad at it. Potentially there are educational opportunities here and the off chance this may become a ‘love’.

Hate & are good at.
Areas in here are the ones you should focus on removing or reduce over time. These items are typically mundane tasks that you ‘have to do’. Work to identify ways to reduce these tasks, are there other people that could take care of these? Can this be automated? Is this still a valuable task that needs to be performed? These are questions to raise and explore as a method to see how it could be removed from your day-to-day.

Love & are good at.
Items you identify in the love and are good at, are going to be areas which you are going to be naturally drawn to anyway, there probably won’t be a huge requirement to spend time focussing on these items. However, if they are not areas in which time is spent, find opportunities to do so.

Love and are bad at.
This is my favourite quadrant and one that I think brings out the biggest opportunities for growth.

An example of a ‘love doing and are bad at’ that I have come across while going through this exercise with people in the past are things like ‘mentoring’.

This is an amazing opportunity to identify people that want to mentor, and are open to grow in these areas. You can then work to identify ways in which to expose them to opportunities to grow here. Figure out what they want to mentor people in, find out ways to seek people who want to be mentored in that, work with them to observe and feedback.

There is a chance in here that after exploring these areas it becomes hate, however, the key thing is this. You already love it, so we should spend time over here learning and growing our knowledge in it.

The key benefit I have found through using this technique is it becomes a tool to use with others is it allows an individual to reflect and explore things they enjoy. Remember why they are doing what they are doing and re-align or re-energise them to keep going and its essentially run by them!

After you explore and fill out the four quadrants, you then work to turn the ones with the top priority into actions. How you might be able to do more of the items in the ‘love’ quadrants that you don’t already do or look at how to remove or reduce the things you ‘hate’ from your day-to-day.

Once this is done, what happens next can be fluid. Some things you identify can be easily time-boxed and actions straight away, others are a gradual shift, and that's ok. The key thing is you have sat through and identified where their priorities should lie. Next time they find themselves doing one of the ‘hates’ it will remind them of this exercise and consider ways of reducing that task.

As a tool and an experiment, I urge you to try this for yourself. Sketch on a piece of paper the four quadrants and explore the things you love and the things you don’t. I have found it a great exercise to align and remind myself to spend more time doing what I love, and less time doing those the things I don’t.