Today
is Day Three of Week Seven of the Omer. That is Forty-five Days of the
Omer. The Theme is: Seven
Principles
First of all, I’ll wish you a Chodesh Tov, a good month. With the setting of the sun today, Rosh
Chodesh Sivan has begun.
The third of the Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People, is Put first things first. Every day when I wake up to begin a new
day, I have in mind a list of things I wish to accomplish that day. Now the aggregate of time required to
accomplish these tasks never amounts to the amount of time I have
available. It hasn’t always been
so. There have been times when my life
was far more hectic than it is now. But
my task-load nowadays is – well, let’s call it ‘manageable.’ That said, by the end of the day I haven’t
always gotten through all the tasks I had assigned myself to accomplish that
day.
There are a number
of reasons for this. Sometimes things
just come up, and I assign to them a priority higher than that of the items on
my task-list. Sometimes they are true
emergencies, and sometimes just things that are more critical to me or to
someone else. For example, if someone
rings and just wants to talk, I usually won’t stop them – unless I absolutely
have to go somewhere or get something done by a certain time. I try to make time liberally for others who
come to me as a Rabbi or as a friend.
But sometimes, I’ll
end the day without having accomplished my list of tasks, and in truth nothing
came up during the day that trumped the items on my list in importance. What happened was that allowed myself to get
sidetracked into spending time on something that simply did not matter.
If this was a few
years back, I would offer as an example of a likely culprit, e-mail. One of the first things I would do when I started
my work day, was to open my e-mail and look at all the new messages. But the truth is, almost every message comes
with a subject line that gives the recipient a general idea of what’s in
it. Between the subject line and the
identity of the sender, it is easy to make a judgement call as to how high a
priority to assign to an e-mail. And
even if now, one can open it and read it quickly, and decide whether it warrants
any quick action. But the truth is that,
even if it did not, I would usually set myself to responding to it immediately.
E-mail is so, as the
kids say, last decade. Today, the
first example of a time-waster that comes to mind, if going through my news
feed on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I
think Facebook is a wonderful tool for communication – you may be reading this
blog post because I posted a link to it on Facebook. But if I took time to read everything that
all my ‘friends’ posted, I would never get anything else done!
This is an example
of not putting first things first.
I started my day with a list of task that were important for me to
accomplish, yet I would allow myself to be easily sidetracked responding to an
e-mail…even if it was clearly not very important. I would even open, and read, and even
sometimes forward e-mails with jokes or funny stories, when I had a list of
yet-to-be-accomplished tasks. If that’s
how I prioritised my work, how could I blame anybody else when I did not
accomplish what I had set out to do? Of
course – nobody. Nobody but myself.
It is all too human
to allow oneself to get sidetracked like this.
Maybe the tasks at the top of your list are not especially pleasant
tasks. Maybe they are things that are
difficult to do. So you put them off,
usually without much thought, burying yourself in little niceties that come up. Because, at the heart of the matter, we don’t
really want to do the tasks that we really need to do.
I’ll never forget when
I was in the Navy and was a watch chief with 11 people in my watch. I had the task of writing, and presenting,
quarterly feedback to each member of my team.
There was one member, a guy I really liked, but I had to give him
feedback that was going to challenge him.
At least, I had to if I was going to accomplish the task with
integrity. So I wrote the counselling
paper up, along with all the others, and I spent a good part of a watch sitting
behind a closed door, counselling each person in turn about his
performance. The man in question, I
saved for last. When we sat down
together, we began chatting and were talking – just about stuff – for some
minutes. Finally, he realised I was
stalling; he pointed at the paper sitting on the table in front of me and asked
me point blank: Is it that bad? No, it wasn’t that bad, but I’d
been avoiding a task that I expected would not be especially pleasant. I was not Putting First Things First.
There is an old
technique for knocking off a long to-do list.
Say, there are ten items on the list.
You take the easiest tasks, those which you can accomplish the quickest
and with the least sweat, first. In
doing so, you cut the list down quickly:
from ten items to nine, then to eight, and so on. By checking off items, you feel the psychological
weight of the long list of unaccomplished tasks, lessen. This is a perfectly legitimate technique, and
I do it often, and it’s not what I’m talking about here. Rather, I’m talking about how we sidetrack
ourselves with time-wasting activities that are not going to lessen our to-do
list at all.
If we learn to Put
First Things First, we will see how much more effective we will be. Try it!
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