![]() In an ideal world, you won’t have too many Q1 tasks demanding your attention. Needless to say, problems, crises, and deadlines usually go in this quadrant. Probably something you'll need to deal with right away, and not exactly something you can outsource to anyone except maybe a less busy partner. After all, if you don’t, you risk tarnishing the company’s brand, losing customers, and putting your own job at risk.Īnother example of a Q1 task is having the principal of your son’s school call to request you come in for a meeting to discuss your kid’s behavior. These items should be pretty easy to identify as they’ll have impending deadlines or require crisis management.įor example, if you’re in charge of social media at your company and there’s a PR blunder on Twitter, you’ll probably want to deal with that immediately. This quadrant is located in the top left of the matrix.Īnything that needs to be done immediately by you should be placed in this quadrant. While we’ve given each of these quadrants a descriptor in the image above-do first, schedule, delegate, and don’t do-more often than not, you’ll find people refer to these quadrants as Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. Tasks are evaluated using the important/unimportant, and urgent/not urgent criteria, and then placed into a grid with four boxes, sometimes known as the Eisenhower Box, The Eisenhower Decision Matrix, or the Urgent-Important Matrix. In essence, it’s a method for processing tasks, projects, and required actions. The Eisenhower Method, or Eisenhower Decision Matrix as it is more popularly known, is a prioritization strategy designed to determine the importance and urgency of the tasks you have been set so that they can either be worked, scheduled, delegated, or avoided. Forced to find a way to effectively manage them, he came up with the Eisenhower Method. The story goes that during World War II, Eisenhower invaded German-occupied France, commanding a staggering force of about two million soldiers. To this day, Eisenhower is still a household name, in part for the role he played in history, but also because his Decision Matrix is taught by schools and productivity experts across the globe. Army, and then later, as President of the United States. Eisenhower rose to prominence as General of the U.S. The Eisenhower Decision Matrix in a Nutshell:īorn in 1890, Dwight D. The question then is, can you do anything about it?īeyond ensuring you’re communicating well with those who set these always urgent and important tasks, adopting a processing and prioritization strategy like The Eisenhower Decision Matrix, can help you figure out how best to handle the many different tasks on your plate, including how to decide which ones you should work on, which you can delegate, and which can be deferred to a later date based on current priorities. The end result of these “unreasonable expectations” and “unnecessary interruptions” is that you’re frustrated, stressed, and overwhelmed. According to Craig Lambert, author of “ Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day,” technological advances, and the new reality of wearing multiple hats (worker, spouse, and parent) have made it such that not only are there increasingly more to-do’s on your plate, but you’re expected to get them done in the same amount of time. If this scenario sounds familiar, you’re in good company. What on earth are you supposed to do to get it all done? Suddenly you feel tired, worried, and inefficient. Now, in addition to the things you had to do this week, there are another five urgent and important tasks for you to fit into an already busy schedule. In just half an hour that neat plan for the week has been made redundant. Your mind is clear and orderly as you enter your first meeting of the day, a problem-solving session with the higher-ups, and a couple of other colleagues. You’ve even gone so far as to sketch out your top three priorities for each day of the week. You’re feeling pretty good about things-organized and focused. It’s Monday and you’ve planned out your entire week using the time boxing method, a new time management strategy you learned about from HourStack. ![]() The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. ![]() I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
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