The Type A+ Podcast Episode 24 - Productivity Month: Be Effective with The Eisenhower Matrix
Episode Description:
We don’t know about you, but as a Type A+ person who wants to do right by my clients and colleagues, distinguishing between the urgent and important items on our to-do list is a constant challenge.
This week, Beth takes a short trip back in time to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, mention Steve Covey, and teach you how to be not just productive, but effective.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Podcast:
The Type A Plus Podcast Instagram
Host:
Beth Lawrence & Company Instagram
Beth will be back each week, delivering bite-sized tips (15-minute episodes or less) on how to optimize your life and work.
Episode Transcript can be found below:
Welcome to the Type A+ podcast with me Beth Lawrence. I'm a certified meeting professional, award-winning event planner, entrepreneur, and the classic over-prepared overachiever. I'm the owner of Beth Lawrence and company an event planning firm that specializes in helping visionaries organize and execute impactful experiences. In each episode, I'll be delivering bite-sized tips on organizing your business and life even during your most hectic times. So let's get started.
Hello, and welcome back to the Type A+ Podcast. I'm excited to finish up our productivity month with the Eisenhower matrix. The 34th US President Dwight D. Eisenhower once quoted an unnamed university president who said, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important. And the important are never urgent. I don't know about you.
But as a Type A+ person who always wants to do right by my clients and colleagues, distinguishing between the urgent and important items on my to-do list is a constant challenge. I have owned a business and I've worked in startups for so long, that I'm used to being agile and handling many different types of tasks all at once.
However, sometimes when I have a full plate, I put an intense amount of pressure on myself to finish everything perfectly all at once. And this causes me to treat all the tasks on my to-do list with the same level of urgency and importance. And that is absolutely a losing battle.
So what does this have to do with former US President Eisenhower, decades after that speech, where he mentioned that quote, and Stephen Covey's bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, these ideas were condensed into a formula for being more effective at work called the Eisenhower matrix or the urgent, important matrix. And you'll notice that I said, effective and not productive.
And I'll leave you to go read Covey's work for yourself. But that is a huge distinction within the book. Psychologically, human beings are drawn to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that are less urgent, even when the less urgent task offers a greater reward.
And the busier we get, the more is on our plate, and the more prominent This is. And with busy people, typically select the less urgent task with the lower payouts.
Exactly because they were busy because it will save them time. And that's what our brains want to do in a time crunch. So how does it actually work? Look at all of your day-to-day tasks.
And your huge projects short term and long-term not only what are you doing today, but what you need to do in the next six months in the next year, thinking strategically, and thinking big picture. Any and all of the tasks and bigger projects will fall inevitably into one of these four quadrants. urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, and not urgent and unimportant.
So, first is one urgent and important task. These are tasks or projects that need to be completed immediately. So think of these as your inevitable tasks.
No matter how much you procrastinate, you'll always have them on your plate, like finishing up a client project, for example. The next ones not urgent, and important tasks are tasks or projects that need to be scheduled onto your calendar.
These are projects that help you achieve long-term goals. And the more that you tend to these types of tasks, the less likely there will be roadblocks in your urgent and important tasks. Third, the type of task is urgent and unimportant. These are tasks or projects or things that need to be delegated to someone else. I know really, really hard to delegate. But think of your busy work. Think of things that are maybe urgent, but related to someone else's priorities that we will put in this category as urgent and unimportant.
The fourth category is not urgent and unimportant, these tasks and projects. Let's just say this is the quadrant of excess and of things. We don't need things that get in the way. Like, for example, scrolling on social media, how much time do we waste?
Honestly, we can see it on our iPhones, right? So for these types of tasks, you need to delete them, delete them from your vision, and delete them as an option from your to-do list. So for me, that looks like finding a way to place boundaries around those tasks, like setting a time limit on social media apps on my phone or removing my phone from my workspace entirely. So to go over it all, again, all of your day-to-day tasks and big projects will either be urgent or important, which needs to be completed immediately. not urgent, but important. Like the long-term strategic planning of your business, urgent and unimportant, these tasks are extremely urgent to someone else, but they're not necessarily important to you.
So these are perfect tasks to be delegated. Fourth, not urgent and unimportant tasks. These are things that we tell ourselves that we need to do or maybe we're on autopilot doing that really, really get in the way of us being effective and efficient and productive at work. Now, I know that this is easier said than done, and it will definitely take some consistency to make this work. And accountability is also a huge piece of the pie when you're moving the needle forward with something like this.
To find an accountability partner who can help you. That is a great way to connect with others. Whether it's in your business, a friend, or a colleague, there are many many different ways that you can create accountability around your goals. But having this urgent and important matrix really does help determine what we should be doing and what we should be focusing on. That is this week's episode Type A+ friends. I hope you enjoy your weekend and we will be back next week with a new episode and a new theme.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Type A+ podcast by me, Beth Lawrence. New episodes will be released each week. Don't forget to find us on Instagram at the Type A+ podcast and slide into our DMS with questions and episode ideas and introduce yourself. If you liked this podcast, please share, give us a five-star rating, and subscribe. I'll see you next time