I came across an interesting tool a while ago. Called the ‘Eisenhower Matrix,’ it builds upon the comment that the 34 President of the USA said in a speech in 1954: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are not urgent.”
I suspect that a lot of readers (ok, the reader) will understand immediately what this means. (Thanks for sticking by me!)
How do we use the Eisenhower Matrix?
1. Make a list of all your tasks, and then place each task in its appropriate quadrant.
2. Within each quadrant, arrange the tasks in order of priority.
3. Spend as much time working on Quadrant 2 tasks as possible. This is where good work gets done. A Quadrant 2 task with the additional pressure of time becomes a Quadrant 1 task, so try to complete it before that happens.
4. Quadrant 3 and 4 tasks are not important, so delegate or delete as many of them as you can. Keep in mind that if they aren’t urgent or important to you, they are unlikely to be urgent or important to anyone else. You don’t want to make your Q4 task someone else’s Q1 task, so be careful not to artificially inflate a task’s urgency through delegation. Wasted time is wasted time, whether it’s yours or your subordinate’s. Be ruthless with your time and the time of the people who work for you, as no one wants to spend their days doing unimportant things.
If you’d like to learn more, please go to: https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix