Many leaders I work with are overwhelmed with the sheer amount of emails, requests, and information that they are bombarded with each day. As a result, they fall into the bad habit of reacting to what’s coming in rather than identifying their top priorities and taking action on those things. In our coaching conversations, we talk about what’s them leader stuck in reactive mode and how to help them shift into proactive mode.
What I’ve seen work time and again are two things to help them break out of this cycle:
- One is carving out the time to reflect and identify top priorities on a regular basis.
- The second is using a tool to help you prioritize your work.
One tool you can use is the Eisenhower Matrix, which you can use to sort out and delineate items that are urgent versus important. It was President Eisenhower who said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” A few decades later, Stephen Covey repackaged Eisenhower’s thoughts into what has come to be known as the Eisenhower Matrix, in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
The Eisenhower Matrix can be a useful tool for you if you:
- Find yourself running around putting out fires all day,
- Are busy but don’t feel like your work has high impact,
- Have long-term goals but no time or energy to make progress on them, or
- Have a hard time delegating and/or saying no
Here’s how you use it.
Look at each of your day-to-day tasks and bigger projects and determine where they fall into one of these four quadrants:
Quadrant 1 is Urgent and Important. They are tasks demand you take action quickly because they have consequences for not taking action. Most often, these are either things that were sprung on you from an external source or things that you put off until faced with a looming deadline. Either way, they require a crisis mode response.
The best response for these is to do them right now.
Quadrant 2 is Not Urgent but Important. These important tasks are the activities that help you achieve your long-term goals. These may not have a deadline (or even an end date) so it is easy to put them off in favor of more urgent tasks. However, these tasks have a much greater effect on your long-term effectiveness. They are things like strategic planning, working on long-term projects, and relationship building.
The best response is to schedule them.
Quadrant 3 is Urgent but Not Important. These tasks are usually distractions or busy work. These tasks are often based on expectations set by others and do not move you closer to your long-term goals. Some examples are: unnecessary interruptions from coworkers, unnecessary reports, or checking your phone or email whenever it goes off.
It’s best to delegate these tasks or avoid getting trapped by them altogether.
Quadrant 4 is Not Urgent and Not Important. These are tasks are a waste of time and items you should delete because they don’t help you achieve your goals. They include watching TV or gaming for hours on end, scrolling endlessly on your phone, or other forms or avoidance behavior.
They are essentially unfulfilling activities and things you can cut out of your life.
Now that you have an overview of these four quadrants, take a few minutes and sort out recurring activities into these buckets. What do you find? Do you notice that you are spending a lot of time in one of these quadrants and not others? I’d like to hear what’s worked for you. Please share in the comments below. Let me know.
What I see most commonly is that most of us don’t spend enough time in Quadrant 2, which is a missed opportunity because that is where most of our effectiveness lives – in planning and thinking high level and being proactive. And that’s where we should spend most of our time as leaders, being proactive and driving initiatives and high-level projects.