Rev up with Design Factory Melbourne #17

Rev Up with DFM is a series of short posts to get your day started. Delivered in bite-sized chunks, this series gives you a taste of a wide range of activities, that you can try out to enhance your own workflow or share them with your team. Each week, we will share an activity varying in four different themes; Gain Focus, Boost Energy, Find Inspiration and Make Connections.

This week’s theme: Make Connections

This week’s Rev Up with DFM focuses on productivity and makes connections with what’s truly urgent and what’s important. 

“Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and short term! Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 address to the Century Association

Eisenhower (more about him later) was quite accurate in his address on how we tend to be blindsided by a sense of urgency over choosing tasks that would have greater long-term payoffs. In this week’s Rev Up with DFM post, we would like to take a look into the ongoing challenge of juggling between urgent tasks and making time for what’s important. We want to enhance clarity in our priorities and make time for strategic thinking. 

With the high pace at work becoming the norm, time and time again we see this challenge in our own work but also voiced by participants in our workshops, colleagues and clients we work with, regardless of the sector or their roles. It seems to be the major blocker for not having enough time for skill development, future planning or focusing on projects that are meaningful. 

Strategic thinking is fundamental for organisational success especially in leadership context (Kabacoff 2014) but more and more in any role. However, we tend to be incapable of making time for something that may not have tangible outputs of immediate payoffs (Horwath 2012). 

What may lie behind this behaviour is called 'the urgency effect'. We are more inclined to perform an unimportant task over an important task when the unimportant task is characterised by a sense of urgency (Zhu et al 2018). In other words, we are conditioned to avoid meaningful work over tasks we feel are urgent. Fortunately, we can flip this tendency the other way round as well. When we focus on the importance of the task and its benefits, we can shift our focus away from the perceived time-sensitivity. 

What may explain this ‘urgency behaviour’ is our desire to resolve discomfort or distraction by accomplishing a task fast regardless of its objective value (Zhu et al 2018). In other words, a way to move away from the reactionary behaviour might be a matter of learning to become more comfortable with unfinished work. Another way to go about this could be to break a task into micro goals to create a sense of achievement. 

Making decisions requires energy, so if possible make decisions on what to focus on when your mental energy levels are up.

Last point regarding the importance-urgency balancing act is about headspace. Strategic thinking does not necessarily require a lot of time, but you need to be in the right frame of mind for it (Clark 2018). Making decisions requires energy, so if possible make decisions on what to focus on when your mental energy levels are up. We are then more likely to make choices requiring self-discipline and hopefully will better see the long-term payoffs over the illusion of being productive by ticking off tasks for the sake of doing it. Similarly, Zhu et al (2018) came to the conclusion in their study and found out that people who identify themselves as busy were more inclined to choose urgent tasks over importance. 

Balancing with urgency and importance - How to do it?

Below we will describe a few different tips and tools for integrating strategic thinking in your work and making clarity and connections with your priorities, so that you don’t fall into the ‘urgency trap’. As said, you need to see what works for you and remember that none of the frameworks are not magic, but they can assist your thinking. 

Eisenhower Matrix 

General Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) served as the 34th president of the United States. In a speech he gave in 1954 he has been said to quote a former college president Dr. Miller saying: 

“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

This is the premise of the Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent/Important matrix. Think of your tasks and use the matrix to prioritise and map them based on their importance and urgency. You can use the matrix to map tasks related to work or your life. 

1. Do first: These are tasks that are important to you and should be done today or tomorrow.
2. Schedule: These are things that are important, but not so urgent. Possibly things you would schedule in your calendar on a regular basis, such as planning or strategy work. 
3. Delegate: Tasks that are urgent but not important to you go in this category. Think of what you can delegate and who could do this task for you or how can you automate it? 
4. Don’t do: This quadrant helps you to identify things you should not be doing at all. They are not urgent nor important to you. 

Take some time to think whether a task is urgent or not and how urgent it is relative to other tasks you are expected or planning to accomplish? Reminding yourself and acknowledging why non-urgent tasks are important, will make you more likely to accomplish them.

Using the matrix can help you to identify where you should spend more time and thus create more space for long-term thinking. Do your best to identify and eliminate the non urgent-not important tasks, to make room and headspace for the more important things. 

Other ways to increase clarity in priorities

1. Accountability partner: Connect with a friend or a colleague and be sounding boards for each other. Social accountability is an effective way to get things moving and also create clarity in your mind as you communicate your priorities and challenges to someone else. Organise a time to discuss for example each other’s challenges.
2. Set time to be reactive and to be proactive. Interruptions are inevitable, so weave those in your daily work and have a follow-up plan of what to do when urgent tasks pop up. Plan for contingency and add buffers for unexpected things in your projects. Also, set some time aside for those important but not urgent tasks identified in the Eisenhowever matrix. This is your dedicated time to be future focused and address areas that pay off in the long term. 
3. Go back to our previous Rev up with DFM post about using the Pomodoro Productivity method and use it to break larger projects into smaller milestones and advance them through focussed and uninterrupted working times. 
4. Take a moment to reflect on your routines in general and perhaps you might find insights into how to build a routine around making time for important, yet non-urgent tasks. How did you set your routines up? What led to it? Is there something you would like to change? What would you aspire to continue doing? What do you need to keep it as a routine? Who could help?

Try out different things and identify frameworks, frequency and times of day that work for you the best. Perhaps you have a checkpoint with yourself and your priorities each week, perhaps each month. Reflect on what works best as building a habit for being proactive. Strengthening your tools and skills to handle unexpected things and changes will make you more adaptable and resilient in the long run. 

Most importantly, practice the skill of not reacting. You are in control of a lot of things. Think about if you consider yourself being ‘busy’ all the time and if there is something you could do about this? An American writer Derek Sivers has said, ’busy is what happens when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s schedule”.

Stay tuned for the Rev up with DFM next week!

References 

Horwath, R. (2012). The strategic thinking manifesto. Strategic Thinking Institute. 

Kabacoff, R. (2014). Develop strategic thinkers throughout your organization. Harvard Business Review, 7.

Clark, D. (2018). If strategy is so important, why don’t we make time for it. Harvard Business Review.

Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2018). The mere urgency effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 673-690.