Master Your Workday Now: Proven Strategi

But the term Workday Now is also a concept that refers to a specific period of time within your work. As you will soon learn, it represents your immediate now at work, plus about a week or so in the future.

It is not a prioritization system based on importance, but it does prioritize the urgency of your work.

the Now Horizon we described above. It is not that no work exists beyond that horizon; it is just that work beyond that point is out of sight and therefore out of mind, and so the man is not anxious about it and probably does not think much about it.

Just selectively move more items off that list and onto the Over-the-Horizon list (page 2 of the Workday Mastery To-Do List from Chapter 2), the list you study only weekly.

So somewhere between one and two weeks is this threshold of work concern. I call it the Workday Now

whether overwhelmed or not, in this model you still do not think much about work outside, or “over,” the Now Horizon.

The Two Most Important System Rules • First, only place items in the Critical Now list if they pass the going-home test: Would you work late into the night to complete these if they were not done? If no, do not put the item on the list. This stringent test will reduce that list to a very reasonable size—you will rarely have more than three to five

Again, I want to mention and emphasize that this is an urgency-based management system, not an importance-based one. It’s not that importance is not important; it’s just that attempting to use importance as your primary decision tool in an urgency-based office environment usually leads to failure.

Another reason people load up nonactionable items that linger from day to day in their Critical Now section is they fail to delineate a task’s next action.

That does not mean you should not apply a true deadline to those tasks that really have them, particularly those imposed from the outside (from your client or boss, for example); there are appropriate times to set true deadlines. And for those, use the technique I showed in the Quick Start: place the date right in the task name like this: DUE Aug 4