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Quoted: Here’s a breakdown: Do (urgent and important). Ng says these tasks are at the core of your job. They are the things you were hired to do and have an u

Quoted: Here’s a breakdown: Do (urgent and important). Ng says these tasks are at the core of your job. They are the things you were hired to do and have an upcoming deadline attached to them. Make these your most important tasks. Decide (not urgent but important). These tasks are core to your job and goals, too, but their deadline is much further out. Decide if you have the time to advance them, but only after you’ve finished your more urgent tasks. Delegate (urgent but not important). These tasks have a deadline but aren’t core to your job responsibilities. Paperwork and office surveys live and breed in this quadrant. If you can, delegate these tasks to someone else. If not, don’t spend a lot of time on them. And if you find yourself running out of time, move them to the delete quadrant when possible. Delete (neither urgent nor important). Ng says it best, “[These] are the things to get rid of because they’re just crowding out your desk space, your drive space, your head space and causing you to not be able to focus on what really matters.” Delete, and don’t look back.

andoando 3y ago
Seems like the obvious approach everyone would take...
- markerz 3y ago
  People aren’t born with this knowledge. Everything we know is learned… As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that everything I’ve learned is something younger or newer people are learning or haven’t learned yet.
- exe34 3y ago
  A lot of people are overwhelmed with "urgent" tasks and in that state, they find it hard to even realise that some are more important than others. The discipline to say no, I'll do this one really important thing first and everything else can wait isn't something everybody is born with.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    People inherently understand that there's stuff you can throw someone or money at it. You don't need a long explaination to teach someone that hiring a maid or ordering a meal will help them if they don't have time to cook and it's not important to them. They might need a lesson on delegation, but these quadrants aren't that (you can effectively delegate important and urgent tasks if you have enough trust) Same for stuff that doesn't matter, people don't need a guide on procrastinating away those tasks (nobody's asking if they should skip their local bookclub events they don't care about) The question is naturally what to do about the stuff that won't go away and need to be done sooner or later. And to be honest, the approach of doing it in order isn't a bad one if you get to do it all regardless of the relative importance within the queue. Basically, why do tough choices if you don't need to in the first place ?
    - mklepaczewski 3y ago
      One reason the Eisenhower matrix is a good productivity tool is that it's simple and fast. It doesn't leave much room for fiddling with it or optimizing the process. Many of today's apps are overly complex, allowing users to tinker with them so much that little to no time is left for actually doing tasks. In our experience ( we run a body-doubling platform for remote workers), complex productivity tools don't work, especially for procrastinators. They may be helpful once someone is already productive and organized, but not before. A good rule of thumb is to throw away tools that have a lot of features or complex decision trees.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> Delegate [...] Paperwork The funny thing in real life is that paperwork and "boring" tasks can rarely be delegated or will need a cost/benefit analysis that becomes in itself a task. For instance taxes. Will you pay an accountant for your taxes ? Either you have enough money to not care, either it's a non obvious trade-off and you need to decide how much you'd be paying vs how much your own time costs and what opportunity you'd lose/gain from there (including not getting fine grained knowledge about how your taxes work) Or for our field, PR/MR reviews. where do they fall, and will you spend time on them or pass the bucket ?
- naveen99 3y ago
  Right. If you are doing paperwork, it’s probably because you are doing someone else’s urgent but unimportant task that they delegated to you. And you have to do some paperwork to leave a paper trail so it’s easier to find where you messed up when the task doesn’t get done.
anonymous_sorry 3y ago
As a software developer, I think I should be almost exclusively working in the top right (important, not urgent). If there is something I need to do urgently then I view this as someone (maybe me) screwing up. It's also not obvious to me why "urgent, not important" gets handled any differently to "not urgent, not important", except that you have to be extra vigilant not to be distracted by the former.

andoando 3y ago

Seems like the obvious approach everyone would take...

markerz 3y ago
People aren’t born with this knowledge. Everything we know is learned… As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that everything I’ve learned is something younger or newer people are learning or haven’t learned yet.
exe34 3y ago
A lot of people are overwhelmed with "urgent" tasks and in that state, they find it hard to even realise that some are more important than others. The discipline to say no, I'll do this one really important thing first and everything else can wait isn't something everybody is born with.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  People inherently understand that there's stuff you can throw someone or money at it. You don't need a long explaination to teach someone that hiring a maid or ordering a meal will help them if they don't have time to cook and it's not important to them. They might need a lesson on delegation, but these quadrants aren't that (you can effectively delegate important and urgent tasks if you have enough trust) Same for stuff that doesn't matter, people don't need a guide on procrastinating away those tasks (nobody's asking if they should skip their local bookclub events they don't care about) The question is naturally what to do about the stuff that won't go away and need to be done sooner or later. And to be honest, the approach of doing it in order isn't a bad one if you get to do it all regardless of the relative importance within the queue. Basically, why do tough choices if you don't need to in the first place ?
  - mklepaczewski 3y ago
    One reason the Eisenhower matrix is a good productivity tool is that it's simple and fast. It doesn't leave much room for fiddling with it or optimizing the process. Many of today's apps are overly complex, allowing users to tinker with them so much that little to no time is left for actually doing tasks. In our experience ( we run a body-doubling platform for remote workers), complex productivity tools don't work, especially for procrastinators. They may be helpful once someone is already productive and organized, but not before. A good rule of thumb is to throw away tools that have a lot of features or complex decision trees.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> Delegate [...] Paperwork The funny thing in real life is that paperwork and "boring" tasks can rarely be delegated or will need a cost/benefit analysis that becomes in itself a task. For instance taxes. Will you pay an accountant for your taxes ? Either you have enough money to not care, either it's a non obvious trade-off and you need to decide how much you'd be paying vs how much your own time costs and what opportunity you'd lose/gain from there (including not getting fine grained knowledge about how your taxes work) Or for our field, PR/MR reviews. where do they fall, and will you spend time on them or pass the bucket ?

naveen99 3y ago
Right. If you are doing paperwork, it’s probably because you are doing someone else’s urgent but unimportant task that they delegated to you. And you have to do some paperwork to leave a paper trail so it’s easier to find where you messed up when the task doesn’t get done.

anonymous_sorry 3y ago

As a software developer, I think I should be almost exclusively working in the top right (important, not urgent). If there is something I need to do urgently then I view this as someone (maybe me) screwing up. It's also not obvious to me why "urgent, not important" gets handled any differently to "not urgent, not important", except that you have to be extra vigilant not to be distracted by the former.