I just finished reading and guiding “Stop Overthinking” as the Book to Body book of the month for September and one thing really stuck with me. The book itself offers a wide array of tools pulled from many disciplines. The one lingering for me is the Eisenhower Matrix.
In the online space there are 5.7 million google results, so clearly this idea resonates with a lot of people with a lot to say on the matter. In general it relies on discerning what is urgent verses what is important. A few things are both. Most are one or the other. Some are neither. We all have a lot of things taking up space in our heads, and the matrix is meant to help us determine how to spend our time by ranking importance over urgency. Today it was brought to front of mind when I ran across this quote:
“You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide. And if you don’t decide, others will do it for you.” -Tony Morgan
It’s unclear to me at this moment if the author knew about the Eisenhower Matrix, but it’s a perfect translation of the concept to a single sentence. In the context of the matrix, “important” applies to things that move you forward and “urgent” would be things that fight fires. The implication at the end feels right – we each must decide to move forward on what’s important or we will spend our life on things we believed were urgent.
I’m now considering urgent as something that far to often is something that is important to someone else and without mindfulness we can pick up an awful lot of urgency and lose what is important to us.
My offering to you today is to consider that our feelings of urgency are often manipulated – by our bosses, by family and friends, by marketers, by those who want or need us to do things for them. It’s not all nefarious but it is all too easy to slip into responding to urgency instead of blocking out time and spaces to focus on what is important.
A simple graphic follows, the instructions are (like the graphic) simple if not easy:
- If an item is urgent and important, do it. These are things that move your personal ball forward and have a deadline requiring they be done or the opportunity will pass. In the scope of all possible things, only a few truly sit here at any given moment. It is important to me to be writing this blog post and writing it moves my work forward – but it isn’t urgent. I could write this today, tomorrow, or next week and the world does not end.
- If an item is important but not urgent, schedule it. Get it out of your head and into a time slot. I have Monday as my scheduled day for writing so that it doesn’t get shuffled until two days before never.
- If it is urgent but not important, question who it is urgent for and delegate it when possible. These tasks most likely do not require your one-of-a-kind self to do. I have to write my blog myself, but I theoretically don’t have to be the web manager that posts it so that job could be delegated. These are the ones I get tangled up in because urgency can make things feel important when they aren’t.
- Neither urgent or important. Delete. This is the junk mail of your life and mind. Filter it out, recycle it. I find a lot of my “should” items live here, and almost anything I say I should do is someone else’s priority, not mine.
This matrix is giving me a lot of deep thoughts on what I do, how I plan to do it, what I don’t do, and what I ask for help on. I hope it does the same for you.
