A way to manage time or prioritize tasks

Managing time, ability to prioritize tasks, making quick decisions has become a key thing now a days, not only at work but also very helpful in the rest of our life.

I was struggling for a while on the best ways to manage time, I was asking leaders, mentors, and as well been asked by mentees about “How do I manage my time”?

One of my previous manager’s introduced me a method to effective time management by asking me questions as in

• Is this urgent?
• Is this important?
• Is this important and urgent?

While I started researching more about urgent/important terminology, I learned that there is a popular matrix to prioritize tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix.

What is Eisenhower matrix?

Eisenhower was 34th president of USA, he used to make decisions based on the below statement

I have two kinds of problems… urgent and important.

The URGENT are not IMPORTANT and the IMPORTANT are never URGENT

The key here is to have a clear understanding of distinction between what is urgent and what is important?

Urgent task generally needs your immediate attention

Important tasks have an outcomes that leads to achieve your goals, be it professional or personal

The Eisenhower decision matrix enables you to plot your tasks in one of the quadrant based on the criteria as follows

• Important & Urgent: These are the tasks that you should not postpone and you should do it ASAP or right away and cannot be passed to anyone. These should be small tasks, if they are big enough then you should think about moving the task to other quadrants.

Examples include: tasks that have deadlines, unhappy customers, emergencies, tasks from your boss that has deadlines etc.

• Important & Not-urgent: Schedule focus-time or blocks of calendar time to work on these tasks, If you don’t have a plan for these then at some point of time they may move to above quadrant (important & urgent). You’ll generally spend bulk (80%)of your time on this quadrant.

Examples: Developing strategies, career development, building relationship with stakeholders etc.

• Not-important & Urgent: These are generally distractions that may not require you to attend, are optional or someone else can take care of. You should opt to delegate.

Examples: non-purposeful meetings, scheduling, attending general emails, things that don’t generally require you.

• Not-important & Not-urgent: Get rid of them

Examples: Office gossip, social media, long emails, meetings that don’t add value.

Overall, We need to more focus on important & not-urgent tasks and ensure they don’t become urgent. You need to schedule these appropriately and should not ignore them.

How can I get started?

There is some pre-work required before you start using this matrix

1. Understand your job/role priorities
2. Understand your professional goals
3. Build your task-list

After the pre-work is complete then you can

1. Plot your tasks based on the above quadrant
2. Do the urgent & important tasks, schedule important & not-urgent items, delegate not-important and urgent items, eliminate not-important and not-urgent items.

Following this approach, you may notice some improvement in managing your time and being productive. I am practicing this technique from a while and I was able to identify and eliminate a lot of tasks that are not-important and not-urgent.

Some other thoughts

• My mindset now changed from question “How do I manage time?” to “How do I manage/prioritize tasks?”. Yes, “You don’t manage time” but you “manage your tasks or prioritize your tasks”
• You also need to really invest in managing your time that will enable you to focus on right things, and stay cool, calm and collected.