The urgent and the important

Some things are urgent, others are important.
Some things are both, others are neither.

If you’re managing a project, spending your time on things that are neither urgent nor important can quickly turn into a disaster. Most time management tips aim at limiting – if not eliminating – time spent on non-urgent and non-important tasks.

If you’re managing your personal time, the opposite might be true. Spending no time on those things can turn into a creativity disaster.

It’s often the non-urgent, non-important tasks that provide us with unexpected insights and new ways to connect the dots.

This allows things to become important, things you didn’t even know would ever be important. Things that only in hindsight turned out to be the most crucial part of your path.

How do you manage your time when it comes to seemingly unimportant and non-urgent things? Do you allow yourself to procrastinate?

So short it fits in my head

That’s a rule that has served me well for quite some time now: To focus my effort on only the things that fit in my head. This, of course, means that it’s quite a short list. Also, for every single item on the list, I tend to focus on what appears to be the most important thing.

Obviously, this approach forces me to say “no” to a lot of things that sound interesting but just don’t fit in my head, currently. It forces me to find clarity about the things that truly matter to me right now and let go of all the cool things left and right that I may find interesting but that would distract me from the things that are on my list.

I very much prefer to do the things that I do with passion and commitment.

How do you manage your time? Do you have a system in place?

Are you strong enough for PowerPoint?

… because you need to be strong to use PowerPoint in a meaningful way.

PowerPoint can turn a great story into a great presentation. But more often than not it does just the opposite. It’s a tool to turn great content into confusing presentations.

PowerPoint invites us to skip clarity and fill slides instead. When we fire up the app, the screen basically says: let’s go and start to write everything that comes to your mind onto a slide. Making bad things worse, we recall having done just that quite recently, so we go hunting for slides that we’ve already got from previous presentations.

PowerPoint doesn’t care the least bit whether, at this point, we already have an understanding of who will be sitting in front of us, why she will be sitting there and what matters to her. PowerPoint favours quantity over quality.

PowerPoint also invites us to set the wrong priorities. When the slides start to fill up, there are all sorts of buttons waiting for us to go looking for fonts, choosing colors, drawing diagrams, designing animations, moving slides etc.

PowerPoint doesn’t care the least bit whether, at this point, we’ve already nailed our storyline, which slides we actually need to make our point and what these slides need to convey in order to make the point. PowerPoint favours “that looks good” over “that’s interesting, relevant and exciting”.

In fact, PowerPoint is happy to eat up all of our preparation time with filling slides and tinkering with the design. After all, a lot of carefully crafted slides look like you’ve worked a lot and achieved a lot – while clarity in your thinking isn’t visible at all from the outside.

Yet, audiences prefer a clear story over confusing slides every single time. PowerPoint will not help you find that clarity. It wants you to make slides. And more of them. And more. You’ll need clarity before you fire up PowerPoint. Without clarity, it’s quite likely that a lot of the time you spend in PowerPoint is just wasted. I’m even willing to take a bet that the earlier you start using PowerPoint in the process of creating a presentation, the greater the risk of wasting time.

But if you are strong enough to resist. If you answer the important questions before firing up PowerPoint. Then it’s a great tool to turn your story into a great presentation.

Be strong! Resist PowerPoint! Start with clarity!

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Picture of Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz