Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is simple. Using the decision matrix below, separate your actions based on four possibilities.
Start by listing down all your tasks in an easily accessible app like SocioRAC. It can be daily tasks or weekly tasks. Once you’re done listing all your tasks you can make a matrix as shown in the video.
We call the first quadrant Do first as these tasks are important for your life and career and need to be done today or tomorrow at the latest. You could use a timer to help you concentrate while trying to get as much of them done as possible. An example of this type of task could be to review an important document for your manager.
The second quadrant we call Schedule. Its tasks are important but less urgent. You should list tasks you need to put in your calendar here. An example of that could be a long-planned restart of your gym activity. Professional time managers leave fewer things unplanned and therefore try to manage most of their work in the second quadrant, reducing stress by terminating urgent and important to-dos to a reasonable date in the near future whenever a new task comes in.
The third quadrant is for those tasks you could Delegate as they are less important to you than others but still pretty urgent. You should keep track of delegated tasks by e-mail, telephone or within a meeting to check back on their progress later. An example of a delegated task could be somebody calling you to ask for an urgent favour or request that you step into a meeting. You could delegate this responsibility by suggesting a better person for the job or by giving the caller the necessary information to have him deal with the matter himself.
The fourth and last quadrant is called Don’t Do because it is there to help you sort out things you should not being doing at all.
Eisenhower Matrix is particularly useful because it pushes us to question whether an action is really necessary, which means we’re more likely to move tasks to the “Delete” quadrant rather than mindlessly repeating them. And if you simply eliminated all of the things you waste time on each day then you probably wouldn’t need any tips on how to be more productive at the things that matter. Using SocioRAC can drastically increase your productivity. Download it now : www.sociorac.com