Enjoy Better Grades By Focussing Your Energies On Important and Urgent Tasks
All too often in life, it seems that the times in which we felt most productive were times when we actually had the least amount of time to spend. What do I mean? Think about that looming deadline set by your boss or that all-too-rapidly approaching final exam.
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?
These are some more detailed examples:
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.
However, how often does this important task turn into and “Important and urgent” task, which is exactly what you don’t want What you need to do is pretend in your own mind that you only have a quarter of the time to get it completed, then you’ll complete it much faster and be able to spend the rest of the time “polishing” the finished product into something really great.
Not important but urgent. You have a quiz tomorrow but you haven’t reviewed anything. It’s worth 5% but you need every mark you can get.
You should have done this in-between other things when you had the time. Now you will feel stress and anxiety that could have easily been avoided.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, concentrate on the areas that you consider the most weak, work on polishing some of those areas 80 percent of the time, then 20 percent polishing your strongest points.
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.
On top of chunking it down into bite size chunks you also need to give each bite size chunk a deadline and timeline, so that you have a realistic expectation and understanding of your workload, this will take the pressure off you, so you can relax when you set time to relax and be very focused in the times you allot for each chunk.
Important and urgent. An important you had the final exam in two days, it is worth on 70% of final grade. You hadn’t put in enough time - so much new material to cover you don’t know where to start an exam.
This is not where you want to be spending your time. You want to spend as much time as possible on important but not urgent issues. Of course, this takes planning and preparation But you will find times when you need to manage important and urgent situations in your education, life and work.
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.
When you get the balance of urgency, study and researching for projects right and align them with a prioritized time table, in particular the urgent assignments and tests, you’ll have a success formula that will see you through not only your education, you’ll have a valuable skill that will enable you to complete any project in your working life as well.
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