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Are You Running a LIFO Time Management Strategy? How Bad Is It?

Do you do what I do? I suspect a lot of us do. With me it’s not just what’s urgent or important, but also what’s on the screen, which window is in the forefront, and what just happened.

It’s like urgent vs. important vs. recent. With a distortion filter for fun, or interesting.

The title of this post comes from basic accounting, handling inventory for accounting purposes as either last in first out (LIFO) or first-in first-out (FIFO). Lately I’ve been doing extreme LIFO. And I’m not sure that’s good.

Urgent vs. Important. It’s a really old paradigm, right? I bet you’ve heard of the problem of confusing urgency with importance. The video here puts it clearly in just a couple of minutes, so I decided to include it with this post.

But that’s not what really happens with me. I’m grateful for what seems like a problem. I’m involved with a lot of interesting things … my flagship company that I founded, business planning, social media, blogging, and lately I’ve had a kick with video editing. My days are easy to fill.

But damn. Every so often I pull my head up out of the immediate and look at what I’m doing and it’s disorganized, not prioritized, kind of fun but not as productive as it could be. I have no discipline about what’s the next thing I do. It might not be either urgent or important; it might just be there. I do whatever is fun or interesting, or just came in.

Is that what you do?

This article was originally published by Tim Berry

Published: March 3, 2014
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Tim Berry

Tim Berry is co-founder of Have Presence, founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International. He is author of books and software including LivePlan and Business Plan Pro, The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, and Lean Business Planning, published by Motivational Press in 2015. He has a Stanford MBA degree and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. He taught starting a business at the University of Oregon for 11 years.