As a schoolboy, I learnt of the three properties of any gas. Firstly they are easy to compress. Secondly, they occupy more space than the solid from which they form. Lastly, all gasses expand to fill their containers.
As an adult, I’ve observed a similar dynamic regarding “work” and “week”. There will always be more “work” than there is “week”. Work not only expands to fill its container, but it will also try and cram more and more of itself into your precious time.
Are you familiar with the following story? You finish a task and realise that you can now take on something else that has sat on your mental to-do list for too long. Different options pop into your head as you consider what to do next, all competing to be selected next. “Pick me, pick me!”
I have often spent so long thinking about which work to start; I eventually realise that I’ve ground to a halt. Paralysis has set-in until I ultimately decide on the winner to begin next, and the losers trudge back to the dark recesses of my mind, dejected and rejected until the next moment of opportunity to try and springboard to the top of the queue.
Context switching is an expensive activity and drains our productivity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a 5-star general in World War 2 and a two-time US President between 1953 and 1961. As well as leading Allied forces to victory against fascism, he oversaw NASA's creation, the US Highway system, introduced civil-rights legislation and led the USA through the Korean War and into the Cold War.
That’s a long list of achievements! He is also attributed with creating the Eisenhower Principle, although he credits a college president who told him how to organise his time.
In 1954 Eisenhower made a speech and said:
"I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
For those with more “work” than “week”, the Eisenhower Principle can be a winning method to organise your tasks to be more productive. You can separate important and urgent tasks from those merely pretending to distract you from your real priorities.
Urgent and Important tasks
There are two types of tasks that fill the week:
Important Tasks
This type of work is critical in achieving goals. We can’t skip important work, and we should plan to complete it. Often this important work doesn’t need to be satisfied immediately, and so we fall into the fallacy that the work isn’t essential.
Urgent Tasks
This type of work demands our immediate attention and often comes to us from other people. The need for this work invokes a response and requires action. Typically these tasks are smaller and quicker to complete but filling your day with Urgent Tasks is a fallacy and makes you feel busy whilst not achieving much.
Many urgent tasks can be delayed, deferred or ignored.
How does the Eisenhower Principle recommend we deal with these types of work?
Important work is strategic to our goals, and we don’t have an option not to do it, or we would suffer personal or professional consequences.
Important and Urgent
If tasks are both important and urgent, we should move them to the top of our queue and tackle them straight away. They are time-bound, and you can’t delay. DO this work today.
Another observation is that often work becomes urgent due to poor time management. If we had planned this important work properly, could we have avoided the urgency?
These tasks interrupt our state of flow and cause delays in other areas. Should we be building slack into our days, anticipating that this work will find its way into our schedule?
Important but Not Urgent
You must do these tasks, but we can defer them. SCHEDULE this work for the future.
Protect that time in your calendar and track the completion of important work. Celebrate the successes in advancing your goals and your proactivity in avoiding an urgent deadline by planning.
Urgent but Not Important
Work is often time-bound but doesn’t contribute to your personal or team goals. Usually, this is someone else’s emergency that has found its way to you. Here is a crucial point as a lot of work falls into this category. DELEGATE this work to someone else.
Delegation can be challenging for people, especially if you don’t have a team around you. Perhaps RESCHEDULE is a better option, or be more rigid in accepting the task if you can deflect it.
Not Urgent and Not Important
A lot of work falls into the last category. A lot of time falls into this category. These tasks aren’t urgent and also do not contribute to goals. Here we find procrastination and yak shaving. ELIMINATE this work - why are you wasting your time on it?
In summary - if you don’t own your work, your work will own you!
Rarely does work come to you without the labels defined by the Eisenhower Principle. By applying these techniques, you could find yourself closer to achieving your goals and in a greater sense of flow.
Please, leave a comment below if you’ve tried this technique before. Let’s share and learn from your experience.
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I meant to say the Eisenhower Matrix has been really been effective to tackle what I refer to as common sense. The concept had been presented at work and I used it to articulate what I mean when I would ask our team to use common sense. Just make your decision in quadrants.
Thanks for sharing, Simon. Although I'd not come across the Eisenhower Matrix before, this is a concept I often refer to as it is the basis of 'Habit 3 - Put First Things First' from Steven Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. As this book was first published in 1989, I'll concede that Eisenhower came up with the idea first.