We all have many things to do each day – pick up the kids from school, go get the groceries, mow the lawn.  And in our business life as  well as our goal plan, we also have many tasks.

The problem is, we usually do not prioritize these tasks.  Most of us have a vague notion of what our priorities are – what is important… but usually what drives us is something else: urgency.

Now urgency is not a bad thing, in fact is is quite useful, but when it is sitting in the seat of importance, it will screw up your life.  Most of us live this way though, we do what is most urgent on our list regardless of how important it is.

And that is a major reason we seem so hopelessly behind in our efforts to achieve ultimate success, and grasp our dreams.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a particular methodology to solve this problem for himself.  He was the 1st Supreme Allied Commander Europe during WWII, was the 1st Military Governor of the American Occupation Zone in Germany, and the 34th President of the United States. He accomplished many great things in his life.  His special method for achieving success has since been nicknamed “The Eisenhower Matrix“.

The Eisenhower matrix is fairly easy to understand: Take your list of things you need to do, and put them on a 2 by 2 grid labeled “Urgency” vs “Importance”.  An example is shown below:

Importance of an item increases from left to right, and urgency increases from bottom to top.

Basically you must make subjective decisions on where your daily tasks fall within this matrix, but it forces you to think about your tasks and make important decisions about if you should even be doing some of them. If something is neither important or urgent, dump it. If it is both important and urgent, do it first. If it is important, but not urgent, do that later, after your important and urgent things are complete. Finally, if something is urgent, but not so important to you, you may either want to dump it, or at most, delegate it to someone else if possible.

You could eliminate many of your unimportant tasks and free up you most valuable asset, time. Doing this allowed President Eisenhower to accomplish so much in his life, and can do the same for you.

The Impact Effort Matrix…

There is a variation on the Eisenhower matrix called the “Impact/Effort” matrix.  What the Impact Effort matrix attempts so do is allow you to discover the tasks that will give the greatest impact for the least effort.  The best possible world is to use both matrices when evaluating your task list.  Then you would want to do your most important, most urgent, least effort tasks first.

Prioritization of tasks is one of your most powerful tools for leveraging your time.

David T. McKee

P.S. Achieve-Master the software contains both priority matrices in the prioritization tab, sign up to be an Achieve-Master beta tester!

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Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Overcoming Obstacles, Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.