The Eisenhower Principle: How to focus on what’s truly important
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“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Over the last four months I have polled a few hundred mid- to senior-level executives and one of the most common underlying causes for their challenges as a manager is that there’s just simply more work to do, closely followed by a lack of time to plan.
Let’s take for example your boss coming to you and tasking you with preparing a presentation for the next leadership meeting at the end of the week. You have a bunch of other seemingly urgent tasks on your to-do list and you’re so overwhelmed you don’t know how to prioritize. Enter: The Eisenhower Matrix. A tool that helps you manage the Urgent versus the Important.
In his 1954 address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, President Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted the president of Northwestern University who said: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This is said to be how Eisenhower managed his workload and has become a useful tool in the business world for time management and can be used in our personal lives as well (especially now that the two are very much intertwined with the onset of the pandemic and much of the workforce working from home now).
So, what’s the difference between the two?
Urgent activities demand our immediate attention, like that last-minute presentation your boss assigned to you.
Important activities contribute to long-term goals, like attending a professional development program so you can be next in line for your boss’s job.
It’s also said that Eisenhower would only allow Urgent and Important tasks to cross his desk and wouldn’t give time to less important and less urgent items. You’ll see a representation of the Eisenhower Matrix in Figure 1 and you can also download a worksheet under the below figure or under the ‘Resources’ tab on my website. The concept is fairly simple—write down all the things that are taking up your (and your team’s) time and then use the dimensions to dispose of them. You can start by creating a 3-column table, writing down a task, then scaling the task from 1 (low) to 10 (high) in both urgency and importance. Then physically, with a pen and paper, plot each item on the matrix. I’ve worked with leaders who have tried this and were shocked at the visual representation of what’s taking up their time. I even had one of my leadership coaching clients laminate her matrix to use on a weekly basis. It helps give you clear focus on what is really important and what really requires your energy.
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Now that you’ve plotted your tasks, the first thing to do is eliminate or postpone everything in Quadrant 3, the less urgent, less important items. They add no value and are basically just “busy work.” Quadrant 4 gives you a great opportunity to practice delegating as these tasks generally do not contribute to your output, and then you’ll have more time for the Quadrant 2 items which require your immediate attention. There are two types of urgent and important activities—ones that you could have not predicted and others that you left to the last minute. To reduce time in this quadrant, do more work in Quadrant 1 which is important for long-term development and strategizing. By scheduling focus time for strategic thinking and planning, and avoiding procrastination, you’ll ideally reduce the firefighting. If you have a lot of urgent and important activities, review them and reflect on which of them you could have foreseen and think about how you could schedule similar future occurrences ahead of time so that they don’t become urgent.
For great time management, you have to be effective as well as efficient, which means you have to spend time getting away from the urgent to focus on the important. Put time blocks on your calendar at least six months out and dedicate that time to reviewing, reflecting, planning, and prioritizing. Don’t let Quadrant 2 items encroach on your time either. Set an ‘out of office’ for those times, turn off all notifications, and honor the time that’s essential for your, and your team’s success.
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