Deciding What to Work On
It's time to talk about time management and prioritization via the Eisenhower Matrix. This helps mitigate the 'mere urgency effect', where people prioritize urgent tasks over important ones.
In an earlier post, Reclaiming Productivity: Time ManagementĀ Tips, I talked about time management and time blocking.
Before you can effectively use time blocking, you must identify what you need to do and prioritize it. The most effective method I've found is the Eisenhower Matrix.
Often, we find ourselves busy but without impact or clear results. Or that we never have time for long-term goals. This is due a phenomenon known as "the mere urgency effect"1 which causes humans to favor urgency over importance. When choosing between two tasks to work on, we're more likely to choose whichever appears the most urgent, even if the next-most-urgent tasks might have significantly higher importance or impact.
What the Eisenhower Matrix teaches us to do is examine both the urgency and the importance of each task when prioritizing work.
If something is both important and urgent, just do it.
If a task is important, but not urgent, then schedule it to do later.
If it's urgent, but not important, delegate these to others (or automate), if possible.
If something is neither urgent nor important, then delete it.
Putting it into Practice
It starts to become automatic with practice. When using time blocking, check each task against the matrix. Those that land in the "do" category should be your first priority, followed by those falling under "do later".
If you are not able to delegate or automate tasks, schedule these after those under "do" and "do later".
Also, remember that these are only guidelines and not rules. You might be find that you have smaller blocks of time available, but your top priorities are all too big. You can break down the bigger, high priority items into smaller chunks, or you can slot in a smaller, "do later" task. Just be careful that you don't end up ignoring those import "do's".
What sort of tasks do you think wind up in the "delete" category?
Until next time,
Brie