Retooling Yourself For Work in the 21st Century

Phyllis Post
Capital University Law Library
ppost@law.capital.edu

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by the number of things in front of you that have to be done? Do you find it hard to prioritize and work on the truly important items? Are you faced with interruptions at every turn from e-mail, the phone, patrons, co-workers? Do you ever go home wondering what the heck you got done that day? I don't mind admitting that all too often I can easily answer "yes" to each of these questions. So I was pleased to settle in for an informative and entertaining hour as Kate Reynolds of the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library gave us a presentation based on Steven Covey's book, First Things First (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Ms. Reynolds started off by talking about personal mission. She asked us if we have a clearly defined mission within our institutions. With a better sense of mission we would be able to look at each activity and ask whether those activities are mission critical, supportive of the mission, or neither. Basically, are we being effective? If mission is clearly defined, the compass rather than the clock will govern us. When the clock governs us, we tend to rely on past practices, stick to specific schedules, or work on things that are labeled urgent. When the compass governs us, we work on advancing our mission, choosing tasks that will meet our objectives.

To help illustrate this point, Ms. Reynolds had each of us spend a couple of minutes listing all of the things we'd done at work the week before. We set those lists aside for a moment and looked at the time matrix model that Covey writes about in his book. The matrix has 4 quadrants called "necessity", "leadership & quality", "deception", and "waste". After she explained these quadrants, we took our lists and began to insert each task into a quadrant. For many of us it was an eye-opening exercise that showed us how easy it is to be derailed from our missions by the numerous wasteful demands on our time. [...continued]