Revenue Journal®

As you probably already know, the most important aspect of time management is deciding where you will spend your attention.

It's difficult to practice good attention allocation because anyone with a need can interrupt you at any time, using a variety of methods to access you and hijack your attention.

One of the most famous, and still-relevant self-management tools is Stephen Covey's four-quadrant matrix for importance and urgency ("important/not important, urgent/not urgent").

We all know we spend far too much time on the urgent/not important tasks; and, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we also spend too much time in the "not important/not urgent" category.

Why? Because we know that if we start that a task requiring uninterrupted concentration, we will be interrupted in five minutes - either by someone trying to access us, or by our own multi-tasking mind trying to take us in another direction. So we tend to keep putting off the large, important projects and focus our attention on those activities that can be easily interrupted.

A great article, "Tangled up in tasks," in the July issue of CFO magazine, cites the statistic that "work interruptions cost the U.S. economy at least $650 billion a year" (which is about 5% of the gross domestic product).

The same researchers say that "28 percent of the typical knowledge worker's day, or 2.1 hours, is consumed by unnecessary interruptions and recovery time." I'm sure you can relate. Anyone with a Blackberry or any sort of instant messaging on their computer would even say that these statistics understate reality.

What was most interesting to me was that the researchers claimed that once a person was diverted, "it took them 25 minutes to return to the original task." It's easy to see how you can make it through an entire day and never touch one of those important, deep-thinking projects.

I think every working person needs from two to five hours of uninterrupted time in each work day, in order to actually make progress on projects.

There is no easy way to do this. You must find a way to carve non-interruption time out of your day. You must either get up early in the morning or stay up after everyone else has gone to bed; you must refuse to answer the phone; you must turn off instant messaging and stop checking your email.

Your own bad habits may be your biggest source of interruptions. In an article a few weeks ago, I mentioned how easy it is for work-at-home entrepreneurs to pop over to YouTube to see the latest viral video - when they know they should be working. I got a lot of response to that comment from entrepreneurs who admitted they often succumbed to those distractions. Of course, it doesn't help that the same screen containing your work is also one click away from the world's largest shopping mall.

One thing you can do is keep a timer at your desk, and simply start it when you start working on an important project, and stop it whenever you get interrupted from that work. Keep track of how many hours you are actually working on important projects every day. You might be surprised. Just because you're at your keyboard, or on the phone, doesn't mean you're doing things that generate revenue. And every time you allow yourself to get interrupted, you're going to lose more precious minutes getting your brain back into the subject again.

Of course, if you really want to motivate yourself, realize that there are only about 4000 weeks in a given lifetime, if you survive into your 80's. You'll spend about 40 to 50 years working, which is about 2,000 to 2,500 weeks (assuming 2-week vacations each year). Do some math - depending on how old you are, you may realize that you've already burned through 2/3 of your working weeks, and if you really want to make a significant contribution to the world, or make enough to retire comfortably, you'd better get crackin'.

Day by day, minute by minute, ask yourself: "What should I be doing now?" And, for your employees, "What should they be doing now?"

99% of the time, we know the answer to this question. That's not the challenge.

The challenge is doing what we know we should be doing, despite all the forces working to keep us from doing as we should.