Food for thought: Friday afternoon blues

Another week another lesson hammered home. The nature of the consultants' profession is that the work load and demands on us is never smooth and is often fragmented. We have many masters to serve, some who pay us our fees (clients), some who pay our salaries (the firm), and usually at the bottom of the pile me (actually, the wife and kids).

So having been caught with too much to do in too short a time again, I find myself resorting to the consultant's version of the "importance vs urgency" matrix which I call the "What should I do next" matrix and which looks like this:

Work priority selector
	Could do	Should do	Must do
Client
Firm
Me (family)

And as so often with these simplistic but incisive consultancy tools, the top right hand corner usually gets the priority.

So here I am on a Friday afternoon, half way through the consultant's week completing a bit of the middle of the matrix so I can concentrate on the important stuff at top right hand corner to make the client happy on Monday.

But if I was a bit more systematic about using this device, I might find my Fridays coming a bit nearer the end of the week.

Have a good weekend!

Ed Moffatt