 Well today we're going to be talking about a very simple and powerful prioritization method called the Eisenhower Matrix and importantly how you can use it at work to help you become more efficient and effective. Hi, my name is Raph, welcome to Riser. My mission is to help you go further faster in your career, sharing what I had to learn the hard way, having come up from packing boxes on a factory floor through to a rewarding executive career. We've got you covered with new content each week so hit the subscribe button to make sure that you don't miss anything. The ability to prioritise and prioritise well is an absolutely foundational skill that is powerful not only in allowing you to do your job well and lift your productivity through your career but helpful in the rest of your life as well. The time you invest in this skill will pay itself back massively and will help you keep cool, calm and collected at the same time. There are many many different ways of prioritising and a number of widely used methods have evolved over time to help us focus on the right things in different situations by taking some of the guesswork out, at least to a degree. I'm going to break down one of these methods, the Eisenhower Matrix, what it is, how to use it as well as a few tips and traps, the pros and cons of using this method in the real world and we're going to rate it to help you decide if and when you want to use it and finally a power tip at the end. By the way, all of this is time coded below if you want to skip to a particular section of interest. So what is the Eisenhower Matrix? Well Dwight Eisenhower, as you may or may not know, was the 34th President of the United States. Before this he had served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces and oversaw the D-Day Normandy invasion which was a major turning point in World War II. For these reasons Eisenhower had a unique perspective and experience in making high stakes decisions fast. He once said in a different accent, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. And apparently he used these two factors, urgency and importance to make his decisions. By all accounts it was pretty effective and thus the Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the urgent important matrix, also known as the forties of time management, the time management matrix Eisenhower box and probably many other things that sell lots of books, was born. And it works like this. Right, so here we are back in the studio which looks suspiciously like my kitchen. Nevertheless, we start with two axes. The first one represents the level of urgency of tasks, from low to high. And the other axis represents the level of importance from low to high. And in this way we can create what's called a two by two matrix made up of four boxes or quadrants. Once we've assigned our tasks to one of these quadrants, here's how the matrix is designed to be used. Tasks that are in quadrant one, both important and urgent, we should take care of as soon as possible. These are your most urgent tasks that can't really be passed on to anyone else to do. Examples here include any item with an impending deadline, urgent requests from your boss, unhappy customers, emergencies and even a family crisis. Ideally we're looking at a small list of tasks here. And if we find ourselves spending the bulk of our time in this quadrant, we should really be reprioritizing to one of the other quadrants or we're going to find ourselves in a vicious cycle of firefighting, which is not only stressful but it's also unsustainable and unproductive. As for tasks that are in quadrant two that are important but not urgent, we need to decide how we want to handle them, typically scheduling or blocking out sufficient time to get these ones done because we know that they have to get done at some point. And the longer we sit on these ones, the higher likelihood they'll end up in quadrant one as urgent tasks, creating more problems. And given that these ones are often more complex tasks, not taking care of these can lead to big bottlenecks. So ideally you want to be spending the bulk of your time working on these ones. And like I said a moment ago, it's recommended you consider scheduling blocks of time in your calendar to make sure this happens and that you don't get distracted by the less important items. Bear in mind that some say you should be aiming to spend as much as 80% of your time here if you want to match the habits of highly effective people. Examples of these tasks include priority projects, developing strategies, as well as tasks directly related to your short and long term goals. So they can also include career development, building relationships with stakeholders and so on. A couple of quick tips here. Because this can often become a big bucket of tasks, you'll need to continually focus on determining if these are genuinely important. And if they've been on the list a while, if they are still currently important. Focus on the quality of your work in this quadrant. Due to the fact these can be larger pieces of work. To get through these effectively, you might have to break them down into pieces that are more specific and then schedule time to complete these pieces. In this way you'll ensure you're not working on too much at one time and still be able to progress your work putting the pieces behind you as you do. Tasks that sit in quadrant 3, being urgent but not important, means they are often not as important to you or your deliverables. So obviously you want to reduce these ones and spend as little time on them as possible. These ones often feel like the distractions. Plenty of emails fall into this category as well as meetings that are not critical for you to attend or with no clear purpose. Also, personal phone calls that you feel obliged to pick up but take you away from your work. Usually these tasks are meaningful to someone else and they need to get done but they don't necessarily require your specific skills or presence. So these ones are sometimes good candidates to delegate to someone else or another team. Now when I say delegate, it doesn't mean you have to be a manager as quite a few people seem to think. If you think of delegation in broader terms, it means letting go of something and empowering someone else to do it instead of you. For example, maybe someone else can attend a meeting on your behalf or another example, if feedback is required on something. Maybe you can divide and conquer so that one person provides the initial feedback and the other adds their two cents and sends it on to the requester. There are various ways to delegate and share the workload especially for those tasks where multiple people are either attending or multiple people are actioning the same work for that particular task. So once again, you don't need to be someone's manager in order to delegate. And lastly, tasks that sit down in quadrant 4 are of the least concern being that they are neither important nor urgent. So the focus here is to get rid of them somehow. Ideally, you don't want to be spending time here and this list should be small. Again, emails are a major culprit here as well as some of those meetings that really don't add value and other examples include long chats, office gossip and of course our friend social media. Now that we understand how to use the Eisenhower matrix, at least the theory of it, here are some of the pros and cons and how I would rate this method. Starting with the pros, even though it does take some time to master, it is pretty easy to learn and almost anyone can start using it straight away. Because we have a tendency to focus on urgent things as well as the things we enjoy, this method is really designed to free up a bunch of time so we can focus on the important tasks. And it does this pretty well being that the four quadrants allow you to take stock of your priorities at a glance. And it's adaptable. What I mean by this is it can be modified or used in different circumstances beyond just your own task management. I've used this tool in various situations including workshops, huddles, project planning meetings and even to prioritize my personal goals. It's also really handy to use as a mental model, for example in situations where you might be under pressure to make a decision fast. I use it as a mental model pretty often, for example in meetings or workshops where actions come up, I use it to ask the right questions to determine the urgency and importance and then I can make a decision on the spot as to how a piece of work might be managed and by whom. So now let's talk about some of the cons. Even though the level of urgency can be determined by deadlines, the model is inherently subjective. For one thing, we have a natural tendency to rank tasks that we enjoy or that we have an affinity with as being higher than other tasks, which doesn't reflect their actual importance or urgency, just how we would like them to be. So think about your definitions of what urgent and important mean from the perspective of their consequence and stay within these definitions. For example, for me, urgent means it has to be actioned within the day or there's going to be an issue. That's the consequence. Important means it's directly related to the purpose of my role and if I don't do it or do it well, I won't meet performance expectations. That's the consequence there. Another issue with this method, because we're dealing with four quadrants, four big buckets, it lacks granularity and in practice you're going to find you often need to refine it a little more in a couple of ways to use it effectively. You'll find that the important but not urgent tasks might need to be ranked because you'll often have competing priorities. And like I said earlier, they tend to be more complex, so you might also need to break them up into smaller pieces to get them completed and build momentum. And thirdly, this method is a little simplistic in that it doesn't take into account other important factors such as the complexity of tasks, the level of effort or available resources. So you're really missing out on those dimensions which might need to be applied to your important tasks to really understand them and rank them within a quadrant. Now, I thought it would also be a bit of fun to rate the Eisenhower method by looking at what I think are three important dimensions. Usability, Accuracy and Adaptability. I gave usability two and a half out of five stars. It's a solid score, but there are both benefits and drawbacks here. As I mentioned earlier, it's super easy to learn and start using, which should quickly help free up your time to focus on important tasks. It's also useful for visualizing and communicating where you're spending your time and why, which is very helpful, particularly in conversations with your manager or if you need to push back on a task that's been allocated to you or a deadline. But there are drawbacks. If you're using it strictly as designed and not as a mental model like I do, you'll also find yourself spending quite a bit of time on the prioritization exercise and reprioritizing because it's not reducing your task list. It's designed to ignore the less important tasks. So to combat this, it's recommended to try and only put a few tasks in each quadrant. But to get to that point and keep your list clean can take serious effort. Also, as mentioned, more complex tasks require additional prioritization and may need to be broken down. So it's not an all-in-one solution out of the box as it were that does everything for you. It does part of the job really well, in my view. Accuracy, which is how accurate the method is at determining relative priorities of tasks, is low. And this is really a function of using only two dimensions, urgent and important, both of which are not able to be measured on their own in any meaningful way. And as I've mentioned a few times, you have more work to do to make the prioritization more meaningful, so I gave accuracy one star. But on the other hand, and where I think this method rarely shines, is its adaptability. Not only can it be used as a mental model and to prioritize anything rarely, it's also simple enough that it can be easily paired with other prioritization tools to create a tailored model that rarely suits the needs of the user. And that's why I've given its adaptability five out of five stars. So we have a total score of eight and a half out of a possible 15, which may or may not be good because it's rarely only valuable as a relative measure to assess against other prioritization tools. And we haven't attributed any weighting to any of the measures, but hey, I enjoyed this for a bit of fun. And I hope you did too. So this leads us very nicely into the power tip. How I think you can use this to improve the effectiveness of your prioritization and take it to the next level. I don't believe in just using one tool, like a single method for achieving the outcomes I want. And this is because I've learned that as we've discovered, each method has its pros and cons, some of which are inherent in the method and others which are determined by the specific situation you're in. And because your initiatives are never static and neither are the requirements and priorities of your role, you'll need to use different tools at different times. So what I like to do is use a few different tools, a few different models that work together. I think of them as components that I can use and apply as needed to get the outcomes that I want. And I find this works really well for me being adaptable to most situations that I find myself in. And I guess that's why I chose adaptability as one of the three rating criteria because it's important in the context of an actual job with all the real life challenges that come with that, as opposed to just the theory of how a tool works in a perfect uncomplicated world. In future episodes, I'm going to be covering various different prioritization methods just like I did here. And I'll show you the logic of how I personally tie these together as components in different ways so that you can not only broaden your own toolkit, but be able to adapt and tailor these tools to your specific situation and needs. If this sounds good, then don't forget to subscribe so you get all the new content as it's released. And also, check the description box below for links to these episodes, which will post when they become available. If you have any questions or comments about prioritization, your job or your career in general, leave them down below, hit the thumbs up button, share this with a friend or a colleague. Till next time, keep rising.