The Urgent-Important Matrix
BZZZ. It’s 6:30 a.m., time to get out of bed and greet the day. As you turn off your alarm you notice that you have a new email waiting to be read. What’s that — a new friend request from your high school chem lab partner? Hmmm… you think to yourself. I wonder what Dave’s been up to over the past eighteen years? Here you are, suddenly enthralled by Dave’s timeline, marveling at the life of a classmate you haven’t thought of since graduation.
Ten minutes later, you’re still scrolling through Dave’s page, well into the depths of 2009 when Dave apparently welcomed Fluffy the guinea pig into his family. As you ponder what life would be like with a guinea pig named Fluffy, it dawns on you that it’s now 6:42 a.m., you have to be at work in an hour, and you’ve just spent nine and a half minutes too long thinking about Dave from high school chemistry.
Whether it be a friend request or a random phone call, we are constantly bombarded with urgent requests that seem to demand our attention, right now. When I see a notification message on my phone, I have to check it immediately. I don’t like to feel like other people are waiting on me, or that I still have something that needs to be done — I’d rather get to it now so that I don’t have to deal with it later.
Sometimes I even find myself checking a pointless Twitter notification when I’m on the phone with my mom. Once I realize what I’m doing, I get frustrated — why am I wasting my time over something relatively silly when I should be doing something important?
Introduced by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 and later popularized by Stephen Covey, the Urgent-Important Matrix helps us categorize competing demands for our attention. By dividing up these demands into four categories, it suggests how we can prioritize certain demands over others. In theory, every action falls into one of the following quadrants:
I) Urgent and Important II) Not Urgent, but Important III) Neither Urgent Nor Important IV) Urgent, but Not Important
Recognizing how we prioritize these demands is often difficult, especially as a parent. From a hungry toddler to Dave’s friend request, we have so many competing demands on our time. It’s easy to put off family time for something more urgent because it feels like you can always do it later — when you live under the same roof, it can feel silly to schedule time to be together.
In the grand scheme of things, however, it’s helpful to differentiate between what’s urgent and what’s important. Checking out Dave’s profile can seem important in the moment. Once you get that notification, you feel compelled to check it as soon as possible. But in reality, why should responding to a friend request from an old acquaintance take priority over your personal or family time? Dave’s request was urgent in the sense that it asked for your immediate attention, but it does not rank high on the importance scale.
When that notification inevitably pops up, ask yourself where the interruption falls on the Urgent-Important Matrix. By identifying which tasks fall into which categories, we can figure out how to prioritize these demands for our attention.
This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.