Prioritize your Problems Now with the Intensity-Frequency Matrix
You spend the first 25 years of your life learning how to solve problems. You spend the next 40 years solving them. And boy do those problems come at you fast.
If you’re good, you’ll get a lot thrown your way. Often more than you can initially handle. This is known as the curse of competence and it can lead to a decrease in performance or being pigeonholed in your current role. We don’t want that. We need a method to take control of our work lives and begin hacking through the weeds of issues in our way.
In this article, I will guide you through my method of using an Intensity-Frequency matrix to help prioritize your problems when no one else will. This method will point you in the right direction when you feel paralyzed by the amount of work thrown your way and will allow you to justify why you prioritized certain tasks or projects over others with the limited time you have. And best of all — it’s ridiculously simple.
The Ultimate Productivity Hack
We all know the ultimate productivity hack is to say no, but sometimes this is not an option.
Sometimes these issues fall under your direct purview, the very reason you were hired. Sometimes you’ve recently inherited a job that comes with many of these prickly problems hiding in the shadows. Sometimes a big project comes your way with an opportunity to grow and get noticed.
I recently inherited one such big project. It centered our flagship product having issues at every step of the manufacturing process. There were multiple complications in multiple phases of the process all requiring desperate attention. I needed something simple, universal, and effective to help prioritize them. The Intensity-Frequency matrix fits the bill.
How to Use the Intensity-Frequency Matrix
The matrix is simple.
On the Y-Axis (vertical) we have Intensity. This is how severe this incident is, or has the potential to be if left unattended. A typo in a procedure or quotation might constitute a 1. Potential bankruptcy may get a 5.
On the X-Axis (horizontal) we have Frequency. This is how often this incident occurs, or has the potential to keep occurring if left unattended. If this is the first time a problem has popped up, it may get a 1. If this is the 3rd time today it’s reared its head, maybe it gets a 5.
Your job or situation will have unique circumstances that drive the numbers you assign to your problems. But intuitively you will know which number should be assigned to each axis.
Once you have assigned a number to each axis, multiply them together to get a final score. The higher the score, the more important it ranks compared to the other issues. Let’s walk through 2 examples.
Wrong Reports
A supplier continually provides the results of a test they do on an older version of the report template. Your company receives about 8 shipments from them monthly, so it’s enough to get alerted more than once a week. It’s not too much of a big deal because the results of the test are accurate and work can continue as normal.
Perhaps your Intensity-Frequency Matrix looks like this. You give the Intensity factor a score of 1 because work continues as normal, and you give the Frequency axis a score of 5 because it happens multiple times a month. This gives it an overall score of 5.
Wanting Widgets
Widgets you produce will occasionally not pass their final acceptance test. It fails to perform the very thing it was meant to do. This will happen twice a month, and you potentially lose revenue each time it fails.
The Intensity-Frequency Matrix looks a little different. You assign the Intensity factor a score of 4 because you potentially lose revenue, and you give the Frequency axis a score of 2 because it happens less so than the first issue. This gives it an overall score of 8.
8 scores higher than 5, so if you were deciding between these two activities it’s now obvious you should start working on the second example as it scores higher than the first.
Conclusion
The next time you have an overwhelmingly large amount of problems that need fixing, you know how to prioritize them simply using the Intensity-Frequency Matrix. And when your manager comes knocking on your door wanting to know why some of these problems haven’t been tackled yet, you have a simple quantitative methodology you can show them that assigns priority.
Hey there, I’m an engineer solving real problems with real people. I write weekly articles on productivity, decision making, analytics, and more at www.joebenyi.com
