Prioritisation and Organisation
Prioritising for Productivity
Taken from articles found at www.productivemuslim.com
Do you have a massive To-Do List that keeps getting longer and longer, and, although you run around like crazy, ticking things off it, you never feel as if you’re achieving anything productive?
There is a solution, alhamdulillah, and you’ve probably heard it before, you need to prioritize! But how do you do that? To work out your priorities, you’ll need to have a system. This will require you taking some time out of your busy routine just to sit down and work out, but insha’Allah, the end result will be worth it.
Allah’s Priority List
What better model to use than one that is in alignment with the model given by our Creator? We all know that when Allah created us, he did so giving us a specific mission in life:
“And I (Allah) created not the jinn and mankind except that they should worship Me (Alone).” (al-Dhariyaat, 51:56)
He then told us how we should fulfill this mission, through a range of activities that He said are either Obligatory, Recommended or Permissible. And having these rulings attached to tasks makes it easy for us to choose which activities to give priority to over others.
But what can we do about all the other tasks that are permissible to us, but don’t have a specific religious ruling attached to them? We need another model for these and we can use man-made models that follow the same principles.
Time Management Matrix
Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix is a really useful tool to use to work out your global priorities. It requires you to examine how you spend your time in relation to your life’s mission. Once you have identified your life’s mission, or your long term goals, it will be easier to complete the next stage.
Take a look at the matrix below. These four quadrants are divided up to help you to identify your activities, as to whether they are Urgent or not, i.e. whether they require your immediate attention, and whether they are important or not in helping you to achieve your goals.
Taken from articles found at www.productivemuslim.com
Do you have a massive To-Do List that keeps getting longer and longer, and, although you run around like crazy, ticking things off it, you never feel as if you’re achieving anything productive?
There is a solution, alhamdulillah, and you’ve probably heard it before, you need to prioritize! But how do you do that? To work out your priorities, you’ll need to have a system. This will require you taking some time out of your busy routine just to sit down and work out, but insha’Allah, the end result will be worth it.
Allah’s Priority List
What better model to use than one that is in alignment with the model given by our Creator? We all know that when Allah created us, he did so giving us a specific mission in life:
“And I (Allah) created not the jinn and mankind except that they should worship Me (Alone).” (al-Dhariyaat, 51:56)
He then told us how we should fulfill this mission, through a range of activities that He said are either Obligatory, Recommended or Permissible. And having these rulings attached to tasks makes it easy for us to choose which activities to give priority to over others.
But what can we do about all the other tasks that are permissible to us, but don’t have a specific religious ruling attached to them? We need another model for these and we can use man-made models that follow the same principles.
Time Management Matrix
Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix is a really useful tool to use to work out your global priorities. It requires you to examine how you spend your time in relation to your life’s mission. Once you have identified your life’s mission, or your long term goals, it will be easier to complete the next stage.
Take a look at the matrix below. These four quadrants are divided up to help you to identify your activities, as to whether they are Urgent or not, i.e. whether they require your immediate attention, and whether they are important or not in helping you to achieve your goals.
The Unproductive You
If you’re feeling as if you’re not achieving much, it’s likely that you’re spending too much time in Quadrant I ‘fire-fighting’ and dealing with matters that can’t be delayed any longer, such as staying up late to finish off reports that have to be in tomorrow.
Or maybe you’re in Quadrant III, running around doing things that other people feel are important, such as helping your friends to complete their assignments or interrupting your work to answer an email, text or phone call that isn’t actually a real emergency and could wait for an answer.
It’s also likely that when you do get some free time, you resort to Quadrant IV activities to relax and switch your mind off, and spend too long checking your Facebook account or watching “rubbish television”.
If you’re stressed, you’re probably not spending enough time in Quadrant II. You’re not being proactive and undertaking activities that will make a positive difference to your life and move you more rapidly towards your goals. Because you don’t have time, but this is exactly where you should be spending the largest proportion of your time.
The Productive Prioritized You
So how can you make the shift to a more productive you?
The first stage is to be sure of your mission in life or your long term goals. You’ll then be able to look at everything you do in your life that distracts you from those goals and eliminate them. This will take discipline, but once your life becomes aligned to your mission, it will be much easier to say “No” to the other things.
The first aim is to get rid of all those Quadrant IV activities. They are just a waste of your time and of no benefit to you.
The next step is to put your Quadrant III activities in their rightful place. For example, when you are checking through your email, you don’t have to read every message or immediately answer messages that need responses straight away. Go through your Inbox quickly and Delete the unimportant messages, Defer those that will take more time to read or answer to a scheduled time later, and only Deal with the ones that really do need a quick immediate answer and can be done in less than 5 minutes.
This will then give you time to concentrate on your Quadrant I and II activities. You won’t be able to avoid the Urgent and Important activities, as many of them are just part of the structure of life, but spending more time in Quadrant II planning and preparing will help to reduce the time you spend there.
Your aim is to gradually increase your Quadrant II time, so you are spending more time, planning how you’re going to meet your goals and doing the background preparation work. Life in the second quadrant isn’t all work and no play; you’ll also be keeping fit, taking part in beneficial recreation and building relationships with your friends and family and those who will help you to achieve your life goals.
Give it a go! Take a good look at all the activities that you do and filter them out into their appropriate quadrants.
-----
OK, so now you’ve looked through your life and at all the things that you need to be doing to achieve your mission and long term goals, and you’ve eliminated all the activities that were wasting your time or don’t serve your goals. So what should you do with the rest of that long to-do list? Where do you start?
Create a Timeline
The first step is to look at the timeline of what you need to do to progress towards your long-term goals to work out your priorities in terms of time.
Break your goals down into smaller steps, so you know what you need to achieve in a year, then a month and then the current week. Doing this will put your activities in perspective and remove many of them from your focus for the time being, so you can just concentrate on what needs to be done now.
When you get down to the level of what you need to do this week, there will be some things that have to be done on specific days, such as appointments and regular meetings, which will already be blocked out on your calendar. There may also be some tasks that you can only do on certain days, due to the need for them to coincide with a particular event, so you can mark them as tasks for those specific days.
Prioritise Your Daily Tasks
Now that you’ve pared down your task list massively to the things that you want to or need to do this week, you need to prioritise them, but how? There are several different systems that can be used, most of them based on numerical or alphabetical systems.
You could just list the tasks for today as 1, 2, 3, etc. in the order that you’ll do them or you could mark each task alphabetically, with A being the most important, B the next most important, etc. But how do you decide which they are?
The ABCDE System
The system I like best for daily activities is the ABCDE system recommended by Brian Tracy. With this system you check over your list of tasks the night before and mark each of them with one of the following letters:
A: Tasks that you must do tomorrow, because if they aren’t done there will be serious consequences. These are often your Quadrant I tasks, but if you’re more organised, they could be Quadrant II tasks, i.e. the tasks that will yield most benefit in moving you towards your goal. Your A tasks could include getting that report finished, writing that article for Productive Muslim, doing the grocery shopping or taking your mother to the hospital.
If you have several tasks in this group, break them down further by listing them as A1, A2, A3, etc.
B: Tasks that you should do tomorrow, but if you don’t there will only be mild consequences. They may cause disappointment if not done or be tasks that could be done another day.
It may be that some tasks that are B tasks now could turn into A tasks if not completed soon, but they should never be done ahead of A tasks. B tasks could include contacting a potential new client, replying to a non-urgent e-mail, reading the latest edition of your professional journal or cleaning the bathroom.
C: Tasks that would be nice to do if you have time, but for which there will be no consequences if you don’t get around to them. These C tasks could include phoning a friend for a chat, going clothes shopping, reading your Facebook page or checking out that new gym.
D: Tasks you could delegate to someone else; that you don’t have to do yourself. If you can delegate these tasks to someone else, it will free you up to do more valuable work that either only you should do or that will move you towards your goals. These could include filing, data entry, gardening or carpooling for the school run.
E: Tasks that you should eliminate. If you’ve already evaluated all your activities on the matrix, you won’t have many tasks in this category, but there may be a few that have been carried over from the previous week that you didn’t get around to and are no longer relevant.
Once you have done this, it will be easy to apply the Pareto Principle to work out which ones are the top 20% of your A tasks that you should concentrate on first to get your 80% result for the day.
It is generally recommended to do these first thing in the morning when you start work, while you’re still fresh. This will ensure that you do get your most important tasks for the day done, so if one of life’s little emergencies does crop up, you won’t have to think about staying up late to complete them.
It takes some discipline to get into the habit of following the ABCDE system, as it’s very easy to start the day off slowly by checking your e-mail or doing less important jobs first. But force yourself to do it and once you get into the routine of prioritising your tasks and getting those most important ones done first, you’ll see your productivity soaring. It’ll also increase your motivation and self-esteem as you rise to higher levels of accomplishment.
About the Author
Amal Stapley, a Life Coach for Muslim women, founded the SuperMuslimah project at www.coachamal.com to support, motivate and encourage Muslim women to step forward in their lives with confidence. After accepting Islam in 1992, she graduated from the International Islamic University of Malaysia with a degree in Psychology and Islamic studies, and then went on to work with Islamic organizations in the USA, Egypt and now in her home country, the UK.
Ten Fabulous Tips to Get Organised!
Taken from www.productivemuslim.com
Are you wasting too much time trying to figure out where your things are, or what to do with your day? If so, organization can help you stop wasting time.
“For every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned.” Unknown
Do you organise your life? How do you organise it? Is it just limited to organising your desk or does it goes beyond that? The world today is a pretty stressful place to live in and it seems that time is too little and we have much to accomplish. In these circumstances, it is of paramount importance that we are on top of our game.
Organising is a major productivity booster as it saves you time, de-clutters your mind, helps you focus on the tasks at hand and gives one the feeling of being ‘in control’ resulting in -the timely completion of the job on time and even do more.
There are a number of actions that we can take in order to organise ourselves and our lives. This could be done through the use of check lists, time tables, calendars, planners, notebooks and lists. Let us take a look at 10 tips through which we can better organise our lives and as a result boost productivity.
1. Wake Up for Fajr
As a beginning, start waking up for Fajr prayers. First of all, you would be fulfilling a major religious obligation which, unfortunately, many of us do not fulfill. Secondly, waking up early will give you a good couple of hours of extra time in the morning enabling you to accomplish more. You can read the Qur’an, exercise, have a nice breakfast and also give some time to your studies while you are still fresh.
2. Manage Your Time
Managing time is very important and this could be done by breaking the larger tasks into smaller steps or actions which you need to take to accomplish each task. Divide it into time blocks and try to accomplish each step in the stipulated time. Moreover, also set deadlines for each task in terms of minutes, hours or even days so that you know how much time you have and manage accordingly.
3. De-Clutter Surroundings
A cluttered surrounding means a cluttered mind. Be it your home, your office, your private work space your inbox or your car, it is important that all spaces are de-cluttered. Seeing a mess around you tells your subconscious mind that there is work to be done, which results in pre-occupation of your mind. This hinders progress even when working on something totally unrelated, resulting in increased levels of stress. In simple words, you need to feel and be in control in order to accomplish your tasks in an effective and efficient way.
4. Prioritise Work
Prioritising work cannot be stressed enough. Try to maintain lists or checklists of the work that needs to be done. You can either have a separate list for different aspects of your life e.g. for office work, for the household chores and for the work you need to get done on your car. There are things that need to be done immediately and others that can wait. Therefore, list all these little projects in order of importance, ending with things that are not urgent and can wait, which will enable you to complete work on time.
5. Take prompt action
Do not delay things. Try to finish them off as soon as possible. The more you pile up work, the more cluttered your mind will become hindering your progress since your brain would be pre-occupied with all the pending work. For example, when I am working in the office and I see any emails filling my inbox, I immediately take action by replying to them, forwarding them or whatever needs to be done. If I let the emails pile up, I think of them and do not concentrate on the project I am working on already.
6. Designate Days
I personally designate specific days for whatever I need to do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. E.g. I have a specific day each week for cleaning my room, washing clothes, doing groceries, maintaining my car, working on finances, personal care or writing articles. This automatically tells me what I need to do on a specific day which enables me to do everything on time, which otherwise would seem like an overwhelming task.
7. Centralize Schedules
Keep all of your schedules, appointments, and lists in one place. Do not use loose paper and instead schedule appointments on your Outlook calendar or keep your check lists in a specific folder so that you know where to make any updates and do not miss any meetings/appointments.
8. Designate Areas
Designating areas for everything will enable you to find what you are looking for and when you are looking for it. Have specific shelves, containers, drawers and trays for the different items of daily use. A little example of this would be that I have a medium sized container and as soon as I enter my room I use it to keep all my keys, wallet, mobile phone, card book and watch so that I do not lose them and know where to find them when I am in a hurry to leave the house.
9. Avoid Time Killers
A major organiser and productivity booster is the avoidance of the many time killers we have these days in the form of technology. Avoid excessive use of the television, Internet, iPads, smart phones and other gadgets which, once we start using, eat up hours and hours of our times. Limiting their use can really leave us with ample time which we can use in constructive activities.
10. Track Progress
Finally, boost productivity by tracking your progress in all parts of your life. Track your work progress, educational development, hours of exercise, household chores, family time, personal tasks and even the good deeds you do and your spiritual growth (use the QamarDeen application). This will tell you how you are progressing, where you stand and what needs to be done in order to increase your productivity even more.
About the Author
Talha Tashfeen Qayyum is a Swiss-qualified hospitality management graduate and a freelance writer who intends to contribute to life, society and Islam through his writings on self improvement and personal development with the vision to positively affect other people’s lives. You can read more from him on www.personal-development.com/talha. Talha can be reached at [email protected]
If you’re feeling as if you’re not achieving much, it’s likely that you’re spending too much time in Quadrant I ‘fire-fighting’ and dealing with matters that can’t be delayed any longer, such as staying up late to finish off reports that have to be in tomorrow.
Or maybe you’re in Quadrant III, running around doing things that other people feel are important, such as helping your friends to complete their assignments or interrupting your work to answer an email, text or phone call that isn’t actually a real emergency and could wait for an answer.
It’s also likely that when you do get some free time, you resort to Quadrant IV activities to relax and switch your mind off, and spend too long checking your Facebook account or watching “rubbish television”.
If you’re stressed, you’re probably not spending enough time in Quadrant II. You’re not being proactive and undertaking activities that will make a positive difference to your life and move you more rapidly towards your goals. Because you don’t have time, but this is exactly where you should be spending the largest proportion of your time.
The Productive Prioritized You
So how can you make the shift to a more productive you?
The first stage is to be sure of your mission in life or your long term goals. You’ll then be able to look at everything you do in your life that distracts you from those goals and eliminate them. This will take discipline, but once your life becomes aligned to your mission, it will be much easier to say “No” to the other things.
The first aim is to get rid of all those Quadrant IV activities. They are just a waste of your time and of no benefit to you.
The next step is to put your Quadrant III activities in their rightful place. For example, when you are checking through your email, you don’t have to read every message or immediately answer messages that need responses straight away. Go through your Inbox quickly and Delete the unimportant messages, Defer those that will take more time to read or answer to a scheduled time later, and only Deal with the ones that really do need a quick immediate answer and can be done in less than 5 minutes.
This will then give you time to concentrate on your Quadrant I and II activities. You won’t be able to avoid the Urgent and Important activities, as many of them are just part of the structure of life, but spending more time in Quadrant II planning and preparing will help to reduce the time you spend there.
Your aim is to gradually increase your Quadrant II time, so you are spending more time, planning how you’re going to meet your goals and doing the background preparation work. Life in the second quadrant isn’t all work and no play; you’ll also be keeping fit, taking part in beneficial recreation and building relationships with your friends and family and those who will help you to achieve your life goals.
Give it a go! Take a good look at all the activities that you do and filter them out into their appropriate quadrants.
-----
OK, so now you’ve looked through your life and at all the things that you need to be doing to achieve your mission and long term goals, and you’ve eliminated all the activities that were wasting your time or don’t serve your goals. So what should you do with the rest of that long to-do list? Where do you start?
Create a Timeline
The first step is to look at the timeline of what you need to do to progress towards your long-term goals to work out your priorities in terms of time.
Break your goals down into smaller steps, so you know what you need to achieve in a year, then a month and then the current week. Doing this will put your activities in perspective and remove many of them from your focus for the time being, so you can just concentrate on what needs to be done now.
When you get down to the level of what you need to do this week, there will be some things that have to be done on specific days, such as appointments and regular meetings, which will already be blocked out on your calendar. There may also be some tasks that you can only do on certain days, due to the need for them to coincide with a particular event, so you can mark them as tasks for those specific days.
Prioritise Your Daily Tasks
Now that you’ve pared down your task list massively to the things that you want to or need to do this week, you need to prioritise them, but how? There are several different systems that can be used, most of them based on numerical or alphabetical systems.
You could just list the tasks for today as 1, 2, 3, etc. in the order that you’ll do them or you could mark each task alphabetically, with A being the most important, B the next most important, etc. But how do you decide which they are?
The ABCDE System
The system I like best for daily activities is the ABCDE system recommended by Brian Tracy. With this system you check over your list of tasks the night before and mark each of them with one of the following letters:
A: Tasks that you must do tomorrow, because if they aren’t done there will be serious consequences. These are often your Quadrant I tasks, but if you’re more organised, they could be Quadrant II tasks, i.e. the tasks that will yield most benefit in moving you towards your goal. Your A tasks could include getting that report finished, writing that article for Productive Muslim, doing the grocery shopping or taking your mother to the hospital.
If you have several tasks in this group, break them down further by listing them as A1, A2, A3, etc.
B: Tasks that you should do tomorrow, but if you don’t there will only be mild consequences. They may cause disappointment if not done or be tasks that could be done another day.
It may be that some tasks that are B tasks now could turn into A tasks if not completed soon, but they should never be done ahead of A tasks. B tasks could include contacting a potential new client, replying to a non-urgent e-mail, reading the latest edition of your professional journal or cleaning the bathroom.
C: Tasks that would be nice to do if you have time, but for which there will be no consequences if you don’t get around to them. These C tasks could include phoning a friend for a chat, going clothes shopping, reading your Facebook page or checking out that new gym.
D: Tasks you could delegate to someone else; that you don’t have to do yourself. If you can delegate these tasks to someone else, it will free you up to do more valuable work that either only you should do or that will move you towards your goals. These could include filing, data entry, gardening or carpooling for the school run.
E: Tasks that you should eliminate. If you’ve already evaluated all your activities on the matrix, you won’t have many tasks in this category, but there may be a few that have been carried over from the previous week that you didn’t get around to and are no longer relevant.
Once you have done this, it will be easy to apply the Pareto Principle to work out which ones are the top 20% of your A tasks that you should concentrate on first to get your 80% result for the day.
It is generally recommended to do these first thing in the morning when you start work, while you’re still fresh. This will ensure that you do get your most important tasks for the day done, so if one of life’s little emergencies does crop up, you won’t have to think about staying up late to complete them.
It takes some discipline to get into the habit of following the ABCDE system, as it’s very easy to start the day off slowly by checking your e-mail or doing less important jobs first. But force yourself to do it and once you get into the routine of prioritising your tasks and getting those most important ones done first, you’ll see your productivity soaring. It’ll also increase your motivation and self-esteem as you rise to higher levels of accomplishment.
About the Author
Amal Stapley, a Life Coach for Muslim women, founded the SuperMuslimah project at www.coachamal.com to support, motivate and encourage Muslim women to step forward in their lives with confidence. After accepting Islam in 1992, she graduated from the International Islamic University of Malaysia with a degree in Psychology and Islamic studies, and then went on to work with Islamic organizations in the USA, Egypt and now in her home country, the UK.
Ten Fabulous Tips to Get Organised!
Taken from www.productivemuslim.com
Are you wasting too much time trying to figure out where your things are, or what to do with your day? If so, organization can help you stop wasting time.
“For every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned.” Unknown
Do you organise your life? How do you organise it? Is it just limited to organising your desk or does it goes beyond that? The world today is a pretty stressful place to live in and it seems that time is too little and we have much to accomplish. In these circumstances, it is of paramount importance that we are on top of our game.
Organising is a major productivity booster as it saves you time, de-clutters your mind, helps you focus on the tasks at hand and gives one the feeling of being ‘in control’ resulting in -the timely completion of the job on time and even do more.
There are a number of actions that we can take in order to organise ourselves and our lives. This could be done through the use of check lists, time tables, calendars, planners, notebooks and lists. Let us take a look at 10 tips through which we can better organise our lives and as a result boost productivity.
1. Wake Up for Fajr
As a beginning, start waking up for Fajr prayers. First of all, you would be fulfilling a major religious obligation which, unfortunately, many of us do not fulfill. Secondly, waking up early will give you a good couple of hours of extra time in the morning enabling you to accomplish more. You can read the Qur’an, exercise, have a nice breakfast and also give some time to your studies while you are still fresh.
2. Manage Your Time
Managing time is very important and this could be done by breaking the larger tasks into smaller steps or actions which you need to take to accomplish each task. Divide it into time blocks and try to accomplish each step in the stipulated time. Moreover, also set deadlines for each task in terms of minutes, hours or even days so that you know how much time you have and manage accordingly.
3. De-Clutter Surroundings
A cluttered surrounding means a cluttered mind. Be it your home, your office, your private work space your inbox or your car, it is important that all spaces are de-cluttered. Seeing a mess around you tells your subconscious mind that there is work to be done, which results in pre-occupation of your mind. This hinders progress even when working on something totally unrelated, resulting in increased levels of stress. In simple words, you need to feel and be in control in order to accomplish your tasks in an effective and efficient way.
4. Prioritise Work
Prioritising work cannot be stressed enough. Try to maintain lists or checklists of the work that needs to be done. You can either have a separate list for different aspects of your life e.g. for office work, for the household chores and for the work you need to get done on your car. There are things that need to be done immediately and others that can wait. Therefore, list all these little projects in order of importance, ending with things that are not urgent and can wait, which will enable you to complete work on time.
5. Take prompt action
Do not delay things. Try to finish them off as soon as possible. The more you pile up work, the more cluttered your mind will become hindering your progress since your brain would be pre-occupied with all the pending work. For example, when I am working in the office and I see any emails filling my inbox, I immediately take action by replying to them, forwarding them or whatever needs to be done. If I let the emails pile up, I think of them and do not concentrate on the project I am working on already.
6. Designate Days
I personally designate specific days for whatever I need to do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. E.g. I have a specific day each week for cleaning my room, washing clothes, doing groceries, maintaining my car, working on finances, personal care or writing articles. This automatically tells me what I need to do on a specific day which enables me to do everything on time, which otherwise would seem like an overwhelming task.
7. Centralize Schedules
Keep all of your schedules, appointments, and lists in one place. Do not use loose paper and instead schedule appointments on your Outlook calendar or keep your check lists in a specific folder so that you know where to make any updates and do not miss any meetings/appointments.
8. Designate Areas
Designating areas for everything will enable you to find what you are looking for and when you are looking for it. Have specific shelves, containers, drawers and trays for the different items of daily use. A little example of this would be that I have a medium sized container and as soon as I enter my room I use it to keep all my keys, wallet, mobile phone, card book and watch so that I do not lose them and know where to find them when I am in a hurry to leave the house.
9. Avoid Time Killers
A major organiser and productivity booster is the avoidance of the many time killers we have these days in the form of technology. Avoid excessive use of the television, Internet, iPads, smart phones and other gadgets which, once we start using, eat up hours and hours of our times. Limiting their use can really leave us with ample time which we can use in constructive activities.
10. Track Progress
Finally, boost productivity by tracking your progress in all parts of your life. Track your work progress, educational development, hours of exercise, household chores, family time, personal tasks and even the good deeds you do and your spiritual growth (use the QamarDeen application). This will tell you how you are progressing, where you stand and what needs to be done in order to increase your productivity even more.
About the Author
Talha Tashfeen Qayyum is a Swiss-qualified hospitality management graduate and a freelance writer who intends to contribute to life, society and Islam through his writings on self improvement and personal development with the vision to positively affect other people’s lives. You can read more from him on www.personal-development.com/talha. Talha can be reached at [email protected]