“Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.” Steven Covey.
Some of us may have heard of Steven Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Most of us have heard of Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th US President, and one of the key military leaders during World War Two. By combining the leadership talents of both, we have what has become known as the Eisenhower Matrix, a powerful time management tool that has been adopted by many business leaders. But why is it known as the Eisenhower Matrix?
Eisenhower was renowned for his productivity whether he was leading and directing military operations as the head of Allied forces or carrying out the weighty responsibilities and diverse duties of being President of the USA. How did he become so productive?
Apparently, he allocated everything into one of two boxes, the important and the urgent. His famous quote was, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are not urgent”.
Wind the clock forward a couple of decades and Steven Covey enters, stage left. He picks up on the impact on managing your time positively through active, some may say aggressive prioritisation, and transformed the basic concept into a powerful time management tool. Expanding on the important or urgent boxes, he added two more. See below.
Lack of productivity has lingered for too long. Economic growth in many of the developed world remains lukewarm at best. At its heart is the ability to establish clear priorities. We encourage our team to decide on their work priorities and design their own workflows. It engenders a real awareness of the key client tasks that make the biggest difference to the client experience.
Those who excel at time management tend to be the most productive. Establishing what’s important and what’s not is the key. These insightful individuals have cultivated an intuitive habit of identifying and doing what needs done first, i.e. the important and urgent stuff.
One of my closest friends, a business owner in the US, is one of these focussed individuals who takes a particularly blunt approach to managing emails. If he’s travelling on business or on holiday, when he gets back he deletes all the emails he’s received while he was gone. “If it’s important, they’ll come back to me.” Is his approach.
If time just seems to be swallowed up without getting all the things you really wanted done completed, the following guidance may help.
Tips for using the Eisenhower Matrix
- Start by deleting : Start with the not important and non-urgent quadrant tasks with limited value. These are distractions at best. Social Media is an immediate and rich hunting ground for you to start with.
- Practice prudent selection: The simple truth is we can convince ourselves that everything is important, but very often it’s not. It’s just appealing. Be realistic and honest when categorising your to do list.
- Manage the number of tasks you take on. It’s easy to be in over your head here. Get a number you are comfortable with and don’t be convinced to take on more.
- Get effective at scheduling tasks. For the important and non-urgent quadrant 2 tasks, get specific dates and time allocated and don’t ignore them.
- Revisit your task list: Keep your prioritisation criteria as consistent as you can. If you need to adapt or change your processes to maintain progress, go ahead. But be honest if things start to slip!
We choose to spend time on the important things. Our clients. Our most important activity is meeting face to face, talking through the issues and decisions we need to discuss. Behind the scenes, we use technology to deal with chores that are neither urgent nor important. It also keeps them off your ever expanding to do list. If issues escalate and become important and urgent, we will sit down with you, talk through the situation and agree the way forward. Rarely are these urgent, but on the occasions where there are time pressures, we prioritise the things that need done to complete everything in good time.
We could email you every day. But we don’t. If it’s urgent or important we will. There are so many competing voices all of them demanding your urgent attention. We would rather you had the freedom to choose how you invest your time more productively. It is, after all the most precious commodity in the world. Once it’s gone…it’s gone!