The Eisenhower matrix
The Eisenhower matrix, sometimes known as the priority matrix, is an invaluable planning tool, and something I have been consistently using for the better part of the last decade.
As someone who has a short attention span and easily gets overwhelmed, I find Eisenhower matrix to be an invaluable tool in allowing me to focus on whatās important, rather than whatās right in front of me.
Oh, I still struggle to make sure that things that are important to me are what matters to others, but thatās a whole different battle - at the very least Iām able to keep my own head straight, and thatās a win in my book.
Without any further ado, I present to you the decision making framework developed and popularized by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States (and clearly a notorious efficiency nut).
Itās pretty simple, really. Take everything from your long single-file To-Do list, and place it on the matrix based on its urgency and importance. Work through the matrix in the following order:
- Urgent and important: get these done, now.
- Important, but not urgent: decide when you want to do these, actively make time for yourself to work on those.
- Urgent, but not important: delegate (read on below if you have no one to delegate to).
- Not urgent and not important: take time to eliminate these tasks.
Do now: a common pitfall
Itās easy to throw everything into the āurgent and importantā pile. In reality, thatās not often the case. If you find yourself throwing everything in the first quadrant - I implore you to think of your tasks in relative terms. Out of everything on your mind, Iām sure some things are more important than others.
I find that over time most of my work shifts into a single quadrant (usually the āimportant, but not urgentā), and I find it helpful to redistribute those, or populate the matrix from scratch.
Schedule: mindful use of time
One of the goals of the Eisenhower Matrix is to increase visibility into how you spend your time. While itās easy to spend most of the time in the āurgent and importantā quadrant, the best work happens in the āimportant, but not urgentā section of the matrix. Thatās where the best use of your time is, and thatās where most of the energy and attention should be spent.
Otherwise youāre just running around like a chicken with its head cut off, although I can sympathise with the difficulty of getting out of the urgency trap. Itās not trivial, and probably downright impossible in some cases.
This is where the biggest pitfall of the Eisenhower matrix lays in my experience. You want to maximize amount of time spent in the āscheduleā quadrant, but you donāt want to end up with a massive list that becomes a yet another To Do list, because one dimensional To-Do lists suck.
Delegate: to whom?
Not everyone has someone to delegate work to. Or not everything can be delegated. In these cases, I treat the ādelegateā bucket the same as āeliminateā. Hopefully that wonāt come back to bite me in the future.
Eliminate: itās hard
I really like following up on things, to a fault. I donāt like leaving loose ends, unanswered emails, or unspoken expectations. I find it helpful to schedule time to explicitly eliminate certain work, and communicate explicit expectations to everyone around me about that. Because of that, thatās where the most of my procrastination happens. Telling people ānoā isnāt always easy, and I still donāt have the best process for combing through the āEliminateā quadrant.
I know many people are a lot more comfortable letting unimportant things quietly fall through the cracks, and thereās nothing wrong with that.