The joke on an old team of mine was that because there was always enough important/urgent work to keep us busy (partly because leadership treated too much as urgent), the important/not urgent stuff never happened, or never happened until it became urgent. Which leads to some problems. But I do think when you’re feeling overwhelmed with stuff it can be a useful categorization system for what you can put aside.
The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there more information about this?
https://www.amazon.com/Eisenhower-in-War-and-Peace-audiobook...
Appreciate the link, and I upvoted for visibility but removed referral code etc, which is against HN Guidelines imo:
https://www.amazon.com/Eisenhower-in-War-and-Peace-audiobook...
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the obvious approach everyone would take...
A lot of people are overwhelmed with "urgent" tasks and in that state, they find it hard to even realise that some are more important than others. The discipline to say no, I'll do this one really important thing first and everything else can wait isn't something everybody is born with.
People inherently understand that there's stuff you can throw someone or money at it. You don't need a long explaination to teach someone that hiring a maid or ordering a meal will help them if they don't have time to cook and it's not important to them. They might need a lesson on delegation, but these quadrants aren't that (you can effectively delegate important and urgent tasks if you have enough trust)
Same for stuff that doesn't matter, people don't need a guide on procrastinating away those tasks (nobody's asking if they should skip their local bookclub events they don't care about)
The question is naturally what to do about the stuff that won't go away and need to be done sooner or later. And to be honest, the approach of doing it in order isn't a bad one if you get to do it all regardless of the relative importance within the queue.
Basically, why do tough choices if you don't need to in the first place ?
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#44This matrix is great. If you're the type who gets lost in fiddling with productivity app UIs, and in general overthinking it, this 2x2 quantization (just one nybble!) might be part of the cure.
That being said, I think 3x3 might be even more helpful. If I drag a task into an Eisenhower Matrix, I'd like the drop point (done using a non-verbal part of my brain) to benefit from a bit of spontaneous intuition.
Also, the upper right (Important but not Urgent) is the Zone of Neglect(TM), where good things go to die. I'd like an app to any every item in that sector and prompt me to break it down into steps. Then it's easier to get started, and it's easier to make stepwise progress.
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#45If I remember correctly, Ike said that tasks can be important or urgent, but never both.
So it makes me laugh that the 2x2 matrix lives on. It has always seemed to me that Ike was getting at a 1x2 matrix (or perhaps a 1x3: important or urgent or neither) and that the real question to ask is whether the task under consideration is important or not.
Then, of course, we need to discipline ourselves to perform important tasks that have no clear deadlines.
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.amazon.com/Eisenhower-in-War-and-Peace-audiobook...
Best productivity story from this book: a White House worker brings President Eisenhower a piece of unopened mail addressed to the President. Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope” and he drills into his team that nothing comes to the President unless it can’t be resolved at a lower level, and when it comes to him he needs to be briefed and presented with his staff’s best thinking and po…
> Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope”
This is correct to the best of my knowledge; the actual opening of said mail should have been handled by the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, established in 1897.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Presiden...
I was a bit curious about what this process looks like in relatively modern times, and found this video from the President Obama White House YouTube channel from 2009:
Inside the White House: Letters to the President
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is not machine like. It’s intentional. The reason these things resonate is because they help us make the decisions we want to be making.
I disagree. I think it's more likely that technology itself is causing us to change our way of thinking, and we think we want to do this stuff but actually we are just resources for the machine.
I don’t think the distinction between urgent and important is a modern one.
The overgrown lawn may seem urgent to mow but if that’s my only free time this week maybe I should hire someone to do it so I can see a financial planner to make sure I am gonna be good in X decades. Etc.
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#48This is not a productivity hack. It is how you're supposed to do things. Indeed, it is how most people on Earth accomplish every single task in their life whether they realize it or not. I wish I was morally bankrupt enough to be a productivity guru. I could, like, charge $50k to stand behind a podium in a hotel ballroom and spout nonsense at desperate people in an attempt to get them to buy my book and planners. It…
> I wish I was morally bankrupt enough to be a productivity guru. I could, like, charge $50k to stand behind a podium in a hotel ballroom and spout nonsense at desperate people in an attempt to get them to buy my book and planners. It would be awesome. Of course it’s your morals, and not that nobody in the whole world cares what “snakeyjake” wants to say about productivity.
>nobody in the whole world cares what “snakeyjake” wants to say about productivity.
You haven’t seen the gilt lettering on the cover of my book and planner yet…
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
#49This isn't really an Eisenhower thing. Eisenhower's approach, as both a general and president, was to assemble a very good staff and delegate, while monitoring how things were going. Staff, not line. Line managers in the military are unit commanders at various levels. Staff officers, derided though they tend to be, are extensions of the commander for whom they work. They have to be very competent but less ambitious t…
I'd like to submit Leslie Groves as another extremely gifted administrator who got big things done inside big organizations. There need to be more studies about his "methods".
There are. He himself wrote "Now it can be Told". The 1998 "The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project" is hard to get, but good. Groves, at peak, had quite an empire - not just the bomb project, but his own air force and his own State Department.
The head of the USSR's atomic bomb project was Lavrentiy Beria. Yes, that Beria, head of the secret police and responsible for various purges and genocides. Yet he successfully ran the atomic bomb program. After the bomb worked, the people who would have been executed if it failed got Hero of the Soviet Union medals. The people who merely would have been sent to gulags got the next medal below that.
Re: The "Eisenhower matrix" productivity hack
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