Time Management 101 - The Eisenhower Matrix

This year, I've spent a fair amount of time training groups of people, as well as coaching some individuals, in Time Management. As a former colleague of mine used to say 'Time Management is the most important training you can get - everybody should do it every couple of years'.

There is, however, a misunderstanding about Time Management. Lots of people think it's about becoming some kind of hyper productive task robot, being able to do loads of work in the time you have available. While productivity is part of Time Management, I wouldn't say it's the core of it. The core is prioritizing - what do DO with my time? Since time is limited and thus scarce (apart from the day only having 24 hours, we also have a limited time span on this planet), we need to make choices on how to use the time we have.

Then we come to the main question of Time Management - how do I decide what I should do with the time I have? That's where the Eisenhower Matrix (see picture on top) comes in. This is basically a tool you can use to do a sort of task triage. The folk tale is that Eisenhower, being all busy commanding allied forces in Europe, developed this tool to allocate his very scarce time properly. The two dimensions of this matrix are 'Important' and 'Urgent'.

The 'Urgent' stuff is everything that has some kind of deadline or is at least time bound. That includes most communications (because people who send you an email would like a response, colleagues asking you to do something are waiting for the outcome etc). Usually the 'Urgent' stuff comes to you, while the non-Urgent stuff just waits around somewhere. Unfortunately, most 'Urgent' stuff is not so important (Category 3).

The other dimension is 'Important', and this is one of the most difficult concepts for people to grasp, perhaps also because we consider all kinds of things in our lives 'Important' (such as breathing, eating, sleeping, wearing clothes, etc). So I usually describe this as 'Having a large impact'. In other words: something at your work or in your private life that has a large impact on your life. Completing your biggest project on time. Getting a good evaluation at your work. Building out a relationship with an important customer. In more personal terms, this can be: taking care of your health. Educating yourself. Being a good friend, partner, or parent.

Most 'Important' stuff is not 'Urgent' (Category 2). That's a problem, because this 'Important' stuff (such as: taking care of your health) will wait around for you to do something. Your body doesn't ask you to go to the gym. And the training doesn't stalk you to book it, either. So whereas the 'Urgent' stuff comes to you and often just requires you to respond to your surroundings, colleagues or communication channels (ie being 'reactive'), the 'Important' stuff often needs a 'pro-active' posture in order to get done.

We often tell ourselves that the 'Urgent' stuff we are doing is 'Important'. (Category 1). But often that is not the case. Of course, if you need to prepare your most important meeting of the year and it's later this week, sure, that's a cat.1 item. But in our normal work we don't encounter so many items that are Category 1. It's a couple of really important things with a deadline per year, plus crisis management. But as I always say, if your job has a significant chunk of crisis management and you don't work for the fire department, there's probably some more planning to be done.

Then the last one is Category 4. This is where all the tasks belong that neither have a big impact nor have a deadline. It consists of 100% useless stuff (procrastination, time sinks such as phone- or social media addiction, Netflix, etc), work related stuff that doesn't add value (meetings you attend that have no goal or outcome, emails without purpose) and things that have limited value but no deadline (for instance: organizing the documents on your notebook desktop, or tidying your basement or attic).

Now that we understand the matrix to some degree, how do we use it? Simple: by doing a time audit (monitoring everything you spend time on during a 1-2 week period) and putting everything that takes up a significant amount of time (30mins plus) in one of the spots in the matrix. Then you might want to add some things that you're not doing, but should probably spend time on (most of those are probably in Category 2). If you'd like to try doing a time audit, read this article on how to do one. Then you reflect, and try to employ some of the strategies I will describe in my next post.