The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack

I could explain the basics of GTD to you in 30 seconds. It’s conceptually pretty easy. The idea of approaching it in a systematic, repeatable way is non-obvious, and I happily paid David Allen for his book to explain how to implement the simple ideas.

My Eisenhower matrix for managers: Do what only you can do, delegate everything else. Don't do things that have no impact.

I used to work for a Stephen Covey fan that had us think according to this quadrant. The main tension was between working ahead on important projects (doing quad 2 before it hits quad 1) without accidentally doing irrelevant quadrant 4 work instead. Staying in true quad 2 for most of the week was brain-burning.

It was fun to poke her about her quad 3 work becoming my quad 1. :) We were encouraged to help our managers prevent that from happening to us by building better systems (quad 2.) Low tolerance for recurring busywork.

Good lessons for this young employee from this framework being seriously applied in a team environment.

I think there are a few things to note to take the Eisenhower matrix from “oh, that’s a nice model” to really gain some serious value from it.

First of all, you need to really work with finding the most important goals for you in your context. Then you figure out what the most important things you could do to achieve this goal in for example the next two years.

Then you will realize you don’t have time to add these things on top of your current workload (like in Scrum, you don’t add new tasks to a sprint without removing other tasks). And when you’ve done that, it’s time to bring forth the Eisenhower matrix.

And in the light of what is truly important, sort your tasks according to the matrix. A key here is also to really think about the Important axis as not important in general but important that You do. Then your job is to delete or delegate enough to be able to fit the new tasks that are the most valuable to achieve your goal.

Also, in the article it says to do the non urgent important tasks after the urgent ones. I think this is really bad thinking. Instead, in the matrix you can see it tells you to plan these things. That’s what you should listen to. The things that are important but not urgent needs to be planned, otherwise they will never get done as there are always too much urgent things to do.

I feel if there's more nuance on the urgency dimension than just "urgent" and "not urgent".

I judge problems in the urgency dimension by "what will happen if I don't do this?" Will my boss be angry at me? Will I get fired? Will there be fines (e.g. tax paid late)? Will a potentially incurable disease be detected too late if I delay this medical appointment? etc.

Two tasks due next week, one of which will officially miss a deadline but not much will happen if I do it a day later, vs. a tax deadline, I'd better work on the tax first, so if it happens that there isn't enough time to do both then at least I've done the one which would have the worst consequences for not doing it.