It’s Sunday, 03 November 2024, 11:00 AM here in India. Deepavali or Diwali, rounded off the Festival Season in India, and it has been a slow transition back to work for many of us 🙂 The clocks are changing across the world, transitioning into daylight savings. India keeps a steady time, and there are no transitions at any point in time here. So it is still 11:00 AM with or without daylight!
Welcome to our 80+ new subscribers who joined us last week! Drop me a line and let me know how you found this newsletter – I am curious.
In last week’s newsletter, we explored Eisenhower’s leadership during both wartime and peacetime. His balanced approach made him one of the most respected American Presidents, and his approach to his work is captured in his quote.
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Dwight Eisenhower
In “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey introduces the Eisenhower Matrix, which has been the foundation of how leaders prioritise and make decisions regarding their work.
The distinction between urgency and importance is a critical component of the Eisenhower Matrix, adapted based on Eisenhower’s approach to work. The Eisenhower Matrix is also called the Urgency-Important Matrix.
“Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and short term! Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 address to the Century Association
Eisenhower Matrix is a 2×2 grid with importance on the Y axis and urgency on the X axis. This 2×2 grid yields four combinations
- Not Important, Not Urgent
- Not Important, Urgent
- Important, Not Urgent
- Important, Urgent
If you have an endless to-do list, you can mark items based on urgency and importance and see which of these four buckets they belong to.
Once you have marked them in terms of their importance and urgency, here is a recommended way to handle them.
- Not Important, Not Urgent: Decline.
- Not Important, Urgent: Delegate,
- Important, Not Urgent: Schedule
- Important, Urgent: Do
Category 1:
Not Important, Not Urgent: Decline, Delete, Defer
These are tasks in your to-do that shouldn’t be there for you to do. These are distractions and do not add value to you or others. If, by your own prioritisation, these tasks are not important or urgent, take them off your to-do list.
If your boss or another team member has delegated this to you, ask for clarity on urgency and importance and reprioritise.
At times, we volunteer to organise work events that are unrelated to our real work. This is great for expanding our network, meeting new people, and building new skills, but if you are overwhelmed with your work, you may want to consider temporarily putting off these events until you get your head back in the game.
Example: Commitments that do not move the needle for you at work, meetings that you “should attend”, distractions such as social media and doom scrolling.
Category 2:
Not Important, Urgent: Delegate, Automate, Optimise, Minimise
These are tasks that have to be done because they are time-sensitive. But these are neither strategic nor add significant value to your outcomes and goals.
The traditional advice for handling such tasks is to delegate. Sometimes, we become the person to whom these tasks are delegated.
If we cannot delegate these tasks, one way to eliminate them would be to look for ways to automate or optimise them so they do not fall under the urgent category and eat away your precious energy and time bandwidth.
Example: Complete that massive spreadsheet that another department needs you to submit every quarter, time-sensitive activities like sending an email at a specific time, etc
Category 3:
Important, Not Urgent: Schedule
We know we must do these tasks at some point because they are strategic and long-term focused as they add value to us in the future. These are the ones that get relegated to the bottom of the pile when there are more urgent things to do.
The best way to handle these tasks is to schedule them in your calendar and ensure you protect that time. The easiest thing to do when dealing with urgent things is to capitulate the remaining time in your calendar to complete the urgent tasks.
But scheduling at least an hour or two of important, not urgent work in your calendar every work day can go a long way toward helping you meet your goals, feel accomplished, and achieve success in your work.
Category 4:
Important, Urgent: Do
There is just one way to deal with these tasks. Do them now. Do them before everything else.
The Trap
The trap we can fall into while categorising our work is marking everything as important or urgent. This is where it is helpful to remember the short-term and long-term goals you are working towards. Not just your organisation’s goals but also your own personal and professional goals. This is what is going to help you prioritise your work.
For example, if I know that a long-term project must be delivered in 18 months, but there are always urgent matters to handle and fires to put out, I will carve out an hour every day to ensure that this important work gets done and that this time is protected at all costs.
How do you categorise your to-do list? What category tasks take up most of your time and energy bandwidth during the day? What would you like to change?
