Hi Folks,
U.S. President Eisenhower is known for a great many things – leading the Allies to victory over Germany in WWII, launching the interstate highway system, creating NASA and DARPA, fighting segregation and McCarthyism… But one of his lesser-known impacts was the inspiration he provided to author Stephen Covey.
In 1954, quoting a university president, Eisenhower said “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” At a high level, this described what became known as the Eisenhower Decision Principle – a means of organizing and prioritizing activities by the intersection of importance and urgency.
Covey, author of the business super-book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, adopted this for the time management matrix he outlined in his book First Things First:
You want to handle each quadrant differently.
- Quadrant 1 needs immediate attention. These are worthy of your attention and need to be addressed now.
- Quadrant 2 is for long-term strategizing. This is where you want to focus most of your attention. Like quadrant 1, these are worthy of your attention, but you have more time to address them in a considered manner. Delay too long, however, and they’ll migrate towards quadrant 1.
- Quadrant 3 is for things that aren’t important, but for whatever reason you need to handle it right now. Think TPS reports.
- Quadrant 4 is the Angry Birds quadrant. There’s no real value other than taking a break from the other quadrants. Don’t spend too much time here or you risk the other quadrants getting out of control.
I think one of the better visualizations I’ve seen for the grid is the following:
But perhaps the biggest challenge is accurately assessing the categorization of a task. If everything is urgent, nothing is.
Hopefully this is familiar to all of you. If not, it’s is a pretty useful tool for prioritizing your time. We all have more on our plate than we can handle – things are going to drop off. We just want to make sure we don’t drop the wrong things.
Rex