When you think about how can we be more productive. It's really about being more present with what you're doing, because you can hit a golf ball better. You can cook spaghetti better. You can tuck your kids into bed better. There's a lot of things you can do a whole lot more productively if you take the broader definition and, interpretation of that term, there are a whole lot of things you can do more productively if your head's clear.
- David Allen
While many of you in Europe are in the middle of summer vacation, my kids have just returned. Which means our schedule just got a little bit more hectic and its time to set priorities straight.
I am a fan of figuring out ways to be more productive, not for the sake of optimizing the number of things I can do, but to ensure I work on the right things AND have time available to just do things I like. One key tool to help me decide is the Eisenhower matrix.
Dwight D. Eisenhower—the 34th President of the United States and a five-star general during World War II—presented the idea that would later lead to the Eisenhower Matrix. In a 1954 speech, Eisenhower quoted an unnamed university president when he said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, took Eisenhower’s words and used them to develop the now-popular task management tool known as the Eisenhower Matrix.
This is especially useful at work when trying to figure out customer priorities. Usually the latest thing that came up all of a sudden becomes the most important. This can be called “the shiny object syndrome.” We forgot this very important project that had to be done and shifted to the new thing, Use this matrix with your team to help define what you REALLY need to work on so you can focus on what matters.
If you need other tools for productivity, check out these episodes.
