Prioritize your daily work, online support

Time management – one the job we need prioritize what we do, every day. Our organizations expect us to manage our time efficiently. It all starts with planning your day. You need to get the important things done, postpone less prudent tasks, and in some cases delegate your own work to others.

The average leader spends 2½ hours each day on email and texting (1). Planning your day precedes going through your email:
“Start your day with your priorities set, in writing, in front of you. Only then should you check your e-mail.” (2)

Surely, your inbox may contain crucial messages which cannot wait any second before being dealt with, so it seams. When your immediate attention is required, the one with this so urgent request can call you.

Planning – or communicating your already outlined plan – 

is an essential part of the daily scrum

Emails – you can go though and handle in the order you choose. Telephone calls by others are mostly ‘interrupts’, the average worker spends 8% of their day with unnecessary interrupts (3).

A daily Scrum Meeting is now standard in many private as well as public organizations (4). At this ‘daily scrum’, you review what each participant did the previous day, and what needs to be done for the remainder of the day, or week. Planning – or communicating your already outlined plan – is an essential part of the daily scrum.

 

Planning is performed at two moments of the day:
•   making your personal day planning
•   the team planning during the daily scrum

 

Why is planning so important?

“Personal productivity involves strategically planning your tasks and schedule to maximize the time spent on your priorities – both professional and personal.” (5)

In other words, make time for work that matters (6).

At Insight Classification Technologies we developed a decision support system for planning your daily tasks at work.

The Eisenhower method
The Eisenhower Method lets you fill in the Eisenhower Matrix, a time management tool which can help you to categorize and prioritize your tasks or to-do list (7). When going through your tasks-to-do each day, assign each task/item into one of four categories:
A)   Urgent and important: you perform these tasks immediately,
B)   Important, but not urgent: you schedule these tasks for later,
C)   Urgent, but not important: you delegate these tasks whenever possible,
D)   Neither urgent nor important: you don’t carry out these tasks if possible.

The Eisenhower Matrix looks as follows

It works by assigning each to-do task into one of the four quadrants in the Eisenhower Matrix.

So you need to assess the importance, and the urgency of each task on your daily list.

Of course, what is important and what is urgent – that depends on your current situation, whether you have a manag­ement role, and not surprisingly, the day of the week.

 

The daily prioritizer – by Insight Classification Technologies
At Insight Classification Technologies, we obtained a dataset with 1027 prioritized daily tasks. The role of the employee is known, as is also the number of persons (s)he supervises. Finally, the weekday is also part of the dataset. We tailored the dataset such that in can be used by our webservice: https://insight-classifiers.com/wos

The following predictive model is built

 

A part of the obtained dataset used is shown in a spreadsheet

 

This dataset contains 1027 cases:

WorkActivity_C;Function_C;EmployeesManaging_C;DayOfWeek_C;Outcome
ReadingBooksTutorialsWeb;CoordinatingFunction;AboveFifty;Tuesday;UrgentNotImportant
PhoneCalls;HROfficer;AboveFifty;Tuesday;NotUrgentNotImportant
CaseBasedWorking;ITDevelopment;Zero;Friday;NotUrgentNotImportant
Emails;LegalProcessional;Zero;Monday;UrgentImportant
SharingContent;AccountManagement;AboveFifty;Tuesday;NotUrgentImportant
JustificationUpwards;ITDevelopment;AboveFifty;Monday;UrgentNotImportant
JustificationUpwards;ITDevelopment;Zero;Thursday;NotUrgentNotImportant
GainFundingAndCommittment;HROfficer;Zero;Thursday;NotUrgentNotImportant
Emails;HROfficer;AboveFifty;Friday;UrgentNotImportant
SharingContent;FinancialProfessional;AboveFifty;Wednesday;UrgentNotImportant
...;...;...;...;...

In CSV-format, the dataset is ready to build a scoring model from.

Build and use model – insight classifiers
You can build a classifier to assign each to-do task into the four categories of the Eisenhower Matrix. When you have the dataset ready in the format shown above, make sure it is available in a standard text editor.

In your browser, go to the web address:
https://insight-classifiers.com
click on the large button : ‘Begin – build and use predictive models’

In the next web page, enter an email address you use in the white box below. You need to be able to read the inbox. See the picture.

The learning session takes less than a minute and results in a predictive model. Use this model directly. Choose the variables by the drop-down menus.

Here, the the to-do work activity is ‘Emails’, the employee has a ‘Coordinating function’, the person supervises ‘1-5’ colleagues, and the to plan working day is ‘Monday’.

 

Now click ‘Compute’:

 

The resulting outcome follows immediately:

 

The most suited outcome is ‘Urgent-Important’ – the upper left entry in the Eisenhower Matrix. Notice that the questions / variables are precisely the columns in the .CSV-file.

The usage screen above depicts the variables used in the CSV-file. If you enter another dataset with different variable names during the build session, these will of course show in the usage screens also.

This use case is presented in the YouTube video:  Youtube

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Visit Insight Classifiers where you can build and use your own predictive analytic models on-the-fly. The prediction models are stored in our cloud, for your later use.

References
(1) [Cmoe, US Survey] https://cmoe.com/blog/how-leaders-spend-their-time/
(2) [A. Mackenzie, 2009] A. Mackenzie, P. Nickerson. The Time Trap, Amacom, N.Y. 2009.
(3) [Talentculture, 2019] https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend-their-time/
(4) [Balcroft, 2020] http://balcroft.com/how-should-you-as-a-manager-spend-your-day/
(5) [Prialto, 2019] https://blog.prialto.com/personal-productivity-is-key-to-meaningful-success.-heres-how-to-boost-it
(6) [J. Birkinshaw, 2013] J. Birkinshaw, J. Cohen, Make Time for the Work That Matters, Harvard Business Review, Sept., 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/09/make-time-for-the-work-that-matters
(7) [EPM, 2021] Expert Program Management, The Eisenhower Matrix,

Any comments or questions to this blog, mail to: product@insight-webtech.com

© Insight Classification Technologies, 2021.
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5246 AH Rosmalen
The Netherlands
https://insight-classifiers.com