Start to Manage Your Time Like This U.S. President
Everyday life can bring a plethora of challenges that demand our time, and it can be tough to choose what to prioritize at any given moment. It is normal to feel like you constantly have items pulling at your attention from multiple worlds.
The good news is, there is an exercise that will help you cut through to what is most important and optimize your day.
This is called the Eisenhower Matrix, and it will teach you to segment your time efficiently so you can be your most effective self every day.
Within this framework developed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, there are four quadrants by which you will categorize your to-do list. In order of priority, it goes, Important Urgent, Not Important Urgent, Important Not Urgent, and Not Important Not Urgent.
Why should you use this?
Because you are probably spending too much time on tasks that can be delegated away or, tasks that do not need immediate attention and can be scheduled at a later date.
- Also, Eisenhower used this to deal with high-stakes geopolitical issues during war times. So there has to be some value here for that reason too.
Going through this exercise will teach you three important lessons:
- How to order your day by priority
- What tasks to delegate
- What tasks to stop doing altogether
Important, Urgent
This category is the utmost priority of your time, these tasks are to be done immediately and to be done to the best of your ability.
Identifying what fits in here should not be challenging, this should be tasks that rely on your intellectual capital to get done. Without you, these would not be done with the same level of effectiveness.
Ideally, you spend as much time as you can on these tasks to maximize your production.
Important, Not Urgent
While these duties are valuable to your effectiveness, they can realistically be done later in the day. When we are bogged down, all issues labeled important can start to enter this grey area on our priority list and it becomes challenging to identify what would move the needle most.
Spend time looking at your regular tasks and find the ones that can be scheduled at a certain point of the day. This lets you give all of your attention to your highest-value driving activities.
- Example: I reserve 2 hours a day in the afternoon to solely engage with my followers’ content and other Medium creators. This time is immensely important to me, though I need to reserve my time for writing content which is my important urgent task.
Not Important, Urgent
These are more than likely menial tasks that do carry a lot of value, they just do not require your specialized intellectual capital to be done.
In this case, you delegate away as much of this as you can. Anything that an assistant, or associate can do just as well as you should prompt you to get this off your plate immediately.
Not Important, Not Urgent
You should consider eliminating these tasks from your day entirely. The reality is job duties change, and what we do on a day-to-day basis needs to evolve. This requires shedding past habits and replacing those with ones that accomplish current initiatives.
If you find any of these tasks in your day, delete them and reserve your time for your highest-value activities.
Nobody is going to make your day efficient for you, spend the time to become an effective high performer!
Let me know what changes you are considering making in your day and if it is going to make a noticeable difference for you.
Thank you for reading!
BR
