We live in a crazy, busy world. That won’t be a surprise to anyone. The at-home quarantine for COVID-19 have even increased the load on workers and families everywhere.
Your day gets crammed with to-do list items that feel overwhelming. What can you do?
If you’re like most people I know, (myself included) you want to get it ALL done. But how do you decide what gets done first and what can wait?
In the face of this global crisis, turning to some old-school thinking just might help you.
Prior to becoming the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower served as the Allied Forces Supreme Commander during WWII. As a general officer, Eisenhower was faced with daunting decisions concerning the tasks he needed to focus on every day. This led him to create a principle that can help us priorities our tasks by looking at whether something is urgent and important.
Using the Eisenhower Matrix
Eisenhower uses four squares to define various stages. Stephen R. Covey in his The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Here is how the four boxes work:
Box 1: Do First
I like to call these things that are both important and urgent your “big rocks”. These are the must win items to get done.
Many of my clients admit that the big rocks can get pushed aside in favor of clearing out a bunch of smaller things. There’s a flaw in that idea though. Fill your day with a bunch of little things like those 135 emails, and your day will be gone before anything got done on the big rock.
The things you know you need to do first can be put aside because of perfectionist tendencies. The thinking sounds like this, “I know this is big. I am not prepared to make it perfect, so I am going to wait.”
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Get busy on those Big Rocks, now!
Box 2: Decide When
Box 2 items are important but not urgent. So what they need is a decision about when.
Items placed in box 2 can have life changing impact; remember they ARE important. Yet you have time to decide when they get done.
Here’s where we need to talk about urgent versus important. People often associate urgent matters with being important, which is not always true.
There are many examples of Box 2 items. Getting another degree can be very important to your career advancement, but does it have to be done right now? Exercising is important for health, but you can schedule the right amount of exercise.
Box 3: Delegate It
Have you ever spent time doing something you thought was so urgent and important, but when it was done you realized it was not?
If so, congrats. You are in great company.
For Box 3 it is important to learn when and how to delegate things. If you lead a team, you have resources. You can salvage your time in favor of letting others do these particular tasks.
If you are in the middle of working on a big rock (Box #1) and the phone rings. You don’t have to answer it. If you see who called, ask a team member to return the call and find out what is happening.
Box 4: Delete It
You want to avoid many of Box 4 items. Examples are playing video games, watching old TV shows. Any mindless web browsing may be a Box 4 item.
You need time to invest in working boxes 1 and 2. The more time you free up by simply deleting things, the more productive you will become.
OK, yes, we need “downtime” to unwind and relax. Take that time. But watch yourself for wasted time doing very unnecessary things. That junk email doesn’t even need to be opened. Just delete it.
Procrastination and the Eisenhower Grid
As I mentioned earlier, procrastination can get you confused about this grid. Sometimes it’s easy to make distinctions between your tasks, other times not so much.
Everything you have in front of you does not fit in one of the boxes. The reality is that all things do fit somewhere, just not in the same box.
Picking up that gallon of milk has to wait while you find your car keys. There is a logical order to things.
For procrastinators, while you wrestle with box 1 and 2 things, you fill your day acting on things in boxes 3 and 4. Ultimately, you feel a sense of missed opportunity.
Here’s How to Use the Grid to See If YOU are Procrastinating
To see if you are spending the bulk of your time in the first two quadrants, do a one-week assessment. To do this, make six copies of a blank grid, and use one grid per day, listing the tasks you accomplished or the activities you did, and the time spent on each thing.
When all of the grids are full, combine the Monday-Friday data onto your sixth summary grid and calculate how much time you spent in each grid, then break those numbers down into percentages.
Evaluate how effectively you spent your time and whether your process needs to be reorganized.
