A wise management consultant once told me, “Time doesn’t exist, only what we do with it does.” WOW! The topic was efficiency in business.
Countless books and renowned authors have told us in various forms that time cannot be managed, but we can manage ourselves, for example, through the time matrix.
The former US president, Eisenhower, used it to manage priorities during his presidency. However, the matrix itself was developed by other time management and productivity experts, such as Stephen Covey, whose book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People widely popularised the use of the time matrix around the world.
In simple terms, the time matrix is a method of task management that organises things we need to do based on their importance and urgency, to help people become more clear-headed and effective in managing priorities.
Filling in your time matrix each day is an ambitious exercise: I have never met anyone who managed to do it for more than two weeks in a row!
And this is where technology – if well implemented – can be incredibly helpful, especially because in today’s businesses, it’s not enough to organise your own priorities. You need to do so in cooperation with those of your colleagues, customers, and maybe even suppliers. Entropy can only grow.
Collaboration is a key feature of CRM ecosystems, and Salesforce offers a very rich set of functions and tools where we can find everything that, according to the time matrix, has been planned, such as:
- Meetings with colleagues
- Calls to customers or suppliers
- Tasks to complete (e.g., drafting a document, sending an email)
- Events (e.g., a scheduled training course, a seminar)
- Personal commitments (would you want to forget your daughter’s birthday?)
The time matrix reminds us that, unfortunately, there are always unforeseen events that disrupt our peace and our perfect plans, such as:
- The arrival of a customer complaint and the urgent handling of the issue
- Your manager calling you in for an unscheduled briefing
- Sending an email that unlocks the R&D team’s progress
Have you tried measuring, over the course of a month, the average time you spend daily managing unforeseen events? An hour? Two hours? Well, with the remaining time, you can daily plan what you should be able to achieve without procrastination.
Quadrant 1 is unpredictable, we accept that, but the others can be tracked in the CRM, including email.
One single tool to consult – the CRM – where you can find everything you have planned, courageously delete activities in quadrant 4, prudently delegate tasks in quadrant 3, and focus on tasks in quadrant 2, the quality quadrant.
It sounds like the realisation of a dream, doesn’t it? Turning on your computer (or unlocking your smartphone) and having one central place to start from, where, with perseverance and method, you can reach the ideal condition of being able to anticipate tasks planned for the future. Utopia or simply using digital tools to serve humanity?