All too often in life, it seems that the times in which we felt most productive were times when we actually had the least amount of time to spend. What do I mean? Think about that looming deadline set by your boss or that all-too-rapidly approaching final exam.

Do you find it easier to complete your tasks when you are stressed for time and having to push to complete work before the deadline ,than when you have no deadline?

These are some more detailed examples:

Not important and not urgent. 10% of your total mark for the course is a book report, but it isn’t due for another three months, and you expect to spend only 10-20 hours reading the book and 4-5 hours getting the report written.

You should get started as soon as possible so it doesn’t become urgent.

However, how often does this important task turn into and “Important and urgent” task, which is exactly what you don’t want What you need to do is pretend in your own mind that you only have a quarter of the time to get it completed, then you’ll complete it much faster and be able to spend the rest of the time “polishing” the finished product into something really great.

Not important but urgent. You have a quiz tomorrow but you haven’t reviewed anything. It’s worth 5% but you need every mark you can get.

You should have done this in-between other things when you had the time. Now you will feel stress and anxiety that could have easily been avoided.

You need to spend most of your time honing the skills you need more practice on, while still perfecting the strongest areas.

Important but not urgent. You have a project which is assigned 35% of your final marks. The due date of completion is in a month and as per your estimate, it will take 20 to 25 hours for completion.

On top of chunking it down into bite size chunks you also need to give each bite size chunk a deadline and timeline, so that you have a realistic expectation and understanding of your workload, this will take the pressure off you, so you can relax when you set time to relax and be very focused in the times you allot for each chunk.

Important and urgent. Your final exam is in 2 days time and 70% of your final grade depends on it. You have not done enough till now. The amount of new materials to be covered is so great that you are not sure where to begin. You start panicking.

This is a waste of your time. The best strategy is to focus the majority of your time on working on things that are important, but not urgent; the trick is to plan your time to make this possible. Sooner or later you will find this skill invaluable in all the aspects of your life.

The best way to handle these is firstly to take a step back from the situation, and look upon it from a “slower” more patient perspective Nothing is so urgent that you need to dive straight in without thinking, you need to do your due diligence in every situation, and that might only be 5 minutes of planning but at least you took a bit of time out and planned before you went ahead.

Once you get this fine balance right, and at the same time learn how to make the urgency “work for you” with especially the urgent projects and exams, you’ll truly have a formula that will see you through any exam, project or work related task you’ll ever need to complete.

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