This one work hack will save life-years.

Sort of click bait, but not. I was at a conference a few years back and actually had this printed on my desk for a year to learn it. It came from President Eisenhower.

Eisenhower lived one of the most productive lives you can imagine and became the President of the United States. During his time in office, he launched programs like a house on fire: The exploration of space (NASA), and the peaceful use of alternative energy sources (Atomic Energy Act) and before becoming president, he was a general in the United States Army, serving as Supreme Commander in Europe during World War II.

Let's just say he was busy. Like us all.

He created a simple decision-making tool that you can use for almost anything, I think it is a total game changer for anyone that feels they can't manage everything that goes on in ther world. Here it is below:

The Eisenhower Box: Be More Productive

Just print this out, stick it on your wall or deskop / phone wallpaper and separate your actions based on four possibilities.

1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

The great thing about this box is that it can be used for any plan (“How should I spend my time each week?”) and for smaller, daily plans (“What should I do today?”).

Here is a box filled out that might illustrate it better for you visual learners like me:

When you use this box to view anything that comes along during the day, you can view to either give it to someone else or to take it on for yourself. The key really, don't take everything that comes at you. There are better people for some tasks.

We have a saying at work: "What is the highest and best use of my time?" there are tasks that I do automatically that really are not the best use of my time.

Ask yourself if this helps accomplish your goals?

One final note is that it can be hard to stop time wasting activities if you aren’t sure what you are working toward. In my experience, there are two questions you should always ask before doing any new task that arrives.

1. What am I working toward?
2. What are the real values that steer my life?

This may all read as common sense, but being mindful of this will literally save years of your life and let you be even more bad ass productive at what you do best.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.