by others to be highly important; at least many chronically busy people believe that other people see them that way. Of course, those other people may be too occupied with themselves to spend a lot of energy admiring their busy coworkers.
Now we come to the bull’s-eye. Here we place “important but not urgent.” Even people with a large share of high-importance, high-urgency functions should aim to spend more time in this area. Why? All activities that fall into this category lay the groundwork for and are prerequisites to being fast and effective when that metaphorical fire should happen to occur. The fire company needs practice drills and maintenance. The gas and water tanks need regular refilling, optimally without the two being confused. So, among other things, preparatory and preventive measures belong in this ring.
Will it be possible for the world’s best fire department to prevent every fire? Of course not. But if it can prevent four out of the next twenty fires, and develop better and faster methods of putting out another three, then that is truly important work being done in ring four. Let’s compare the results of this fictional fire company with those of a fire company that is very skilled at putting out fires but only operates in ring three. What do we see? Ring four means both better results (fewer overall fires, and some of them extinguished more quickly than before) and less stress – certainly a most desirable situation! How much of your time do you spend putting out sudden and unexpected fires?
We have already established that it is impossible to avoid all acute situations, which is why we need a ring three. No one is completely prescient. Let us take an example from private life. Imagine you get a call from school that your daughter has had an accident. It’s nothing life-threatening but she has broken her arm. In this case it is naturally important as well as urgent to take care of the matter. In the work world, such “emergencies” arise frequently. But in fact, many matters that originated in ring four, and optimally could have been completed there, wander over to ring three with time (or rather the lack thereof) without anyone having done anything, quite literally.
A classic example is your tax return. If you live in the U.S.A., you know it’s due on April 15. The topic is important because it can have distinct negative consequences if you do it wrong or fail to hand it in. You are informed long in advance of this deadline and therefore theoretically have more than enough time to get the tax forms filled out. Without your doing anything, the activity drifts one ring farther to the outside with the passage of time and lands in the stressful ring three.
The additional time we’re recommending you spend in the bull’s-eye, ring four, has to come from somewhere. Where is it supposed to come from? Primarily this time must be taken from the two outer “unimportant” categories. Classic examples from your private life could be reducing the time you spend watching TV, arguing less, and organizing things so that you don’t need to spend lots of time looking for them and can get errands done faster. Topics at work can involve redundant activities, getting bogged down in details, excessive perfectionism in less important areas, time for tactical games, small talk (of the kind that does not deepen the business relationship), and of course wasting time in meetings that are less than optimally productive (more on this topic later).
You can immediately spend more time in the bull’s-eye if you are disciplined about limiting the time you spend in rings one and two. In the medium run, you will increase the percentage of time you spend in the innermost productive category by learning from those stressful situations and sudden fires. You can become better able to prevent some situations from recurring while becoming better prepared to face others. That is true time intelligence. With time and practice, it is absolutely possible to have a successful career and spend more than half of your time in this zone of time intelligence. The two are in no way mutually exclusive. On the contrary: there is a clear positive correlation between amount of time spent in the time intelligence zone and professional success, satisfaction, and low stress level.
Goals? Good Results and Less Stress!
“Think globally, act locally, panic internally.”
We have already reached the conclusion that if we spend more time in the center of the time target our level of stress is lowered. And low stress was part of our “point system” in this game of darts. But what about the other part of keeping score, the measurement of results? Do our results tend to be better or worse for living in the bull’s-eye? They’re definitely not worse, because we are concentrating on important matters (as in ring three). In the short run you may not notice a difference in the results, but in the medium run you will, as does the fire department that prevents some fires and manages to put others out faster.
Through focusing on the time intelligence zone we become more strategic. We concentrate more strongly on activities that have a more powerful effect. Instead of spending time executing your processes themselves, you spend more time working on the processes, meaning they are being optimized. You are now working more on the department rather than in it. As a sales manager you now spend more time refining the sales process rather than making the sales. As an entrepreneur you are free to spend time you used to devote to transacting your business on refining how your business runs. The difference may, on first reading, seem small, but in terms of your business philosophy and results it will make a huge difference. We could say it is one small step for you and one giant leap for your results.
Of course there is still a need for people in every organization who are primarily responsible for putting out fires. In some areas more than others this lies in the nature of the work. For example, someone working at an IT helpdesk has the job of reacting quickly so the user can continue working. Compared with the helpdesk, a company’s strategy department (due to the nature of the work) usually has fewer issues that come up suddenly.
The IT helpdesk can be seen as representative of many other areas. Remember Savior Sam’s story from earlier in this book? He had only enough time to continue reacting in crisis mode. It is a department manager’s job to ensure that the work force can spend at least 10% of its time on the analysis and prevention of recurring problems rather than on reacting and just “keeping things running.”
Generally, the higher you rise in an organization (and the larger your family or household is), the larger becomes the number of competing responsibilities that you need to reconcile. This makes it even more important to avoid getting bogged down in urgent topics and to focus on working intelligently rather than simply working a lot.
Implementing systems that then run on their own is a good example of such work. By this we mean that, although you initially need to put in effort, you save time once the system is up and running. The model no longer needs to be “time, benefit, time, benefit,” etc. but rather “time, time, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit,” etc. That is the formula for temporal freedom. As a small digression, the formula for financial freedom is the switch from “time, money, time, money,” etc. to “time, time, money, money, money, money,” and so on. And financial freedom also grants more temporal freedom.
But back to the systems. It is important to know and have access to reliable people who can collaborate with you or relieve you of certain tasks (without wanting to reduce people to a mere function). This goes for work-related as well as private topics. If you cannot pay someone privately then try an exchange – surely you have useful skills that could help the other person. In this way you complete more while at the same time working on something you enjoy or are skilled at.
Planning is another important aspect of such systems. Normally, planning is not an urgent matter. Rarely will someone come to your door saying, “You really need to plan now.” You could just as well skip this step, but planning gives you the advantage of making up the time you spent on devising the actual plan once it is implemented – and chances are you’ll make it up exponentially. Even taking the fifteen minutes to sit down and plan your week will definitely save you time later on. If you get in the habit of doing this every week, it will, in our opinion, become a system that is useful for you.
Take a mini-inventory of your use of time by following these steps: First, make as detailed a list of your past five workdays as possible. Figure out approximately how much time you spent on each activity, then assign