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Emergency Time Management is what’s needed when the stress from a lack of time is moving toward being toxic. This article offers four ideas to help people who don’t have enough time to even think about starting on a time management program.

The best Emergency Time Management strategy is to stop answering your phone when you’re doing important tasks such as a project at work, time with children, or exercise time. The phone, for many people, eats time on wasted calls and disrupts focus, productive thought, and work time. We all get all sorts of calls. Many are important. But virtually all can be delayed and dealt with after we finish more important tasks.

The phone causes two problems when we’re trying to focus. Firstly, a ringing phone disrupts our train of thought. Even if you don’t answer there is an intrusion. So I advise people to turn their ringers off when they’re not going to answer anyway. The second problem is that most telephone conversations are not as important as identified tasks we want to complete.

What I suggest is that people schedule three hours every day to simply focus on doing tasks that they have decided are important and turn off their phones during that period of time. So, for example, say you have a 9-5 administrative or executive job. I suggest planning several important tasks to get done in the morning while your voicemail is accumulating messages. When you get the tasks done, say by noon, check your voicemail and start returning the calls in order of importance. If three hours is too long, try one hour. When you try this experiment you’ll discover that virtually every call can wait.

The second strategy is what I call Emergency Prioritization. It takes motivation and focus. If your time management stress is truly moving into the toxic range, the motivation should be there. The objective of Emergency Prioritization is to sort through all the stuff you have on lists in your brain and choose to work only on what’s important. I suggest making three lists.

The first list includes only the most important activities. Call this your A list. Keep this list short (say five items) and plan to work on it first thing every day – and don’t answer your phone while you’re working on it – although it may mean making a number of phone calls.

The second list contains everything else you have to do. This is your B list. Plan to work on this list later in the day after you’ve had success with your A list. Getting tasks from your A list done frees up mental energy to work more efficiently and effectively on your B list. You’ll find that your B list will start out being long but it will get shorter over time as you spend more time on important A list tasks earlier in the day.

The third list is your Won’t Do list. This is a list of things you don’t do (for example, windows, having lunch with whiners, negative or boring people, answering the telephone in the morning, staying late at work on your son’s baseball night, etc.). Obviously if you avoid doing the things on your Won’t Do list, you’ll stay away from activities that use your time badly.

A third Emergency Time Management strategy is Baby Steps. This works for people who have a difficult time getting started on big or complicated projects.

Baby Steps involve breaking projects (or tasks or processes or objectives) down into small parts so you can start working on something that will be easier to accomplish than the whole thing. What you want to do is line up a series of easy to do pieces of the project. Every time you complete one of these Baby Steps you’ll earn a sense of accomplishment and a burst of energy.

The ultimate Emergency Time Management strategy is to Delegate to the Trash Can. Just don’t do it, to coin a phrase. If you’re a working parent and you don’t have enough time to play with your kids and get the beds made every day, stop making the beds. That will give you more time to spend with your children. Playing with your children is more important.

Delegating to the Trash Can is the process of making decisions about what is important and what isn’t, and then only working on the important ones until you run out of time or tasks.

It takes a certain ruthlessness to be the kind of person who Delegates to the Trash Can, but it is a very empowering feeling. My suggestion is that when you’re ready to not do something, make a show of it. Quickly write a description of the task on a piece of paper, read it to yourself, then tear the paper into small pieces and throw them into the trash can. That’ll make it feel like you’re accomplishing something and you’ll remember what it is you don’t want to do.

Emergency Time Management is mostly about identifying what is important and what isn’t important. Then you ruthlessly focus your time on what is important and avoid the rest. The first step, if you just need a little time to get balanced, is to stop answering your phone. You’ll may be a little lonely for a few days but you’ll feel less stressed out about your time management.