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Leonardo da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian Man”,
drawn in 1490 and named in honor of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius - illustrates
his understanding of proper proportion as an artist and philosopher.
As a self-diagnosed workaholic, I’ve been struggling to
achieve a healthy balance between my work and the rest of my life for my entire
career. When I first came on board at
IIAN 29 years ago (yikes!), with an active junior high school age daughter, a spouse
with his own career, and a huge work challenge in front of me, it was very easy
– and at first almost essential – to focus on work to the exclusion of almost
everything else in my life.
Call it sick, but I really, really LOVED to work (and still
do). I was good at organizing the myriad
projects, programs, and people IIAN needed to succeed – most often at the
expense of my personal development and relationships. Needless to say, I had a pretty high stress
level!
Bill Brown - a very observant and wise past IIAN president -
suggested that I and key staff members complete a program called “Priority
Management®”, which turned out to be a life-changer for me. After
going through their course and starting to use the system, I actually thought I
could become the “Vetruvian Woman” – balancing Work, Family, Social,
Intellectual, Financial, Physical, and Spiritual goals. Which of course required that I actually develop
and attempt to implement a personal strategic plan (ha!).
I must admit I’m a backslider on the personal planning
side. But I’ve been able to incorporate the
core of the program into my work life – a fairly simple system to provide
managers and staff the discipline they need to focus on what needs to be done at
work - each day, each week, each month, and each year - to achieve major goals
and succeed, while maintaining personal and professional balance, through effective
time management.
Simply put, it forces you to spend most of your time and
best energies each day on what’s important, and not allow the “urgent but not
important” to rule your life. You do it
by planning each day and assigning an “A” or a “B” to each item on your to-do
list. “A”s are: 1.) Commitments and promises, 2.) Steps
leading to goals, and 3.) Must do’s.
“B”s are: All other items not
critical to today.
An extremely useful tool for further categorizing your “A”s
and “B”s is to assign them to one of the following quadrants:
M-1 Important and Urgent – Always
an “A”
M-2 Important
and Not Urgent – Always an “A”
M-3 Not
Important but Urgent – Could be “A” or “B”
M-4 Not
Important and Not Urgent – Always a “B”
The key strategy is to schedule time blocks for M-1 and M-2
items (and stick to them as much as possible), see if someone else can help you
do M-3 items, and not let M-3 and M-4 items highjack your days, weeks, months,
and years.
There are many products available to help people be more
effective at work – but this is the one that helped me that I can
recommend. Back in the l980’s it was a
paper-based system (and paper is still available) – including tools for
planning, project management, communications management, and more. Nowadays it has been adapted to work with MS
Outlook, Google, and other popular software platforms – but many people are now
going back to paper! Check it out at www.prioritymanagement.com . |