Create the structure and accountability to accomplish what matters most to you, instead of just fighting fires every day. This exercise is for people who don’t feel like they’re accomplishing what is most important to them and who struggle with time management.

Great for:

•  Working parents struggling to balance work and life.
•  Professionals who are overwhelmed and drained at the end of the day.
•  People who have a lot on their plate and need to manage their time carefully.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

This exercise is for working professionals, such as busy moms and dads, new college graduates or those juggling going back to school while working full-time. Having chased the lie that a work-life balance is attainable, you’ve either tried to do everything and failed or have failed to do what matters most.

Being in control of how you spend your time is especially important when you feel you don’t have time for everything you want to do. The problem is we tend to spend our time on urgent tasks and overlook the things that are truly important to us.

The Eisenhower Matrix pictured below, which I call here Radical Prioritization, is a time management tool that can be used to group your tasks according to how important and urgent they are.

Urgent tasks demand immediate attention, and if we’re not careful, the urgent items can consume the whole day. This could be dealing with a health issue that could have been avoided with healthier habits or not planning well and running late on deadlines.

Important tasks help us achieve life goals. This is why it is essential to keep your eye on what is most important to you. If you spend your time accomplishing tasks that are not in line with what is important to you, you will finish the day exhausted and frazzled.

Important tasks are where we should be spending our time. These can include getting enough rest, spending quality time with family, helping your children with homework, saving money by cooking at home, and working with high performers on your team. Important tasks fall into two categories – “Urgent & Important” or “Not Urgent & Important”.

This exercise helps you to create the structure and accountability in your daily schedule so you accomplish what matters most to you, instead of just fighting fires every day 먹튀검증.

Step 1: Categorize the importance and urgency of your tasks

1. Urgent & Important tasks
Write down 3 things that you find yourself doing every day because you are reacting to situations. These are tasks which must be done today, but often could have been avoided with a little bit of planning. For example, today I had to make sure my children had clean uniforms for school.

If you’re not careful, these tasks will consume your whole day. The goal is to look at these tasks with a critical eye. What could have been done to avoid this urgency? For me, I could have bought more uniforms (a “Not Urgent & Important” task) so I didn’t have to do laundry mid-week.

2. Not Urgent & Important tasks
Write down 3 things that you would really like to do and are important to you. For me this list includes: writing a book, getting a morning walk in daily, and reading daily.

3. Urgent & Unimportant tasks
Write down 3 things you did today or yesterday which came up and had to be attended to, but someone else could have done, either delegated or hired out to a service like Fiverr. For example, yesterday I could have got one of the people on my work team to prepare an agenda for that meeting.

4. Not Urgent & Unimportant tasks
Write down 3 things you did today or yesterday that could have waited. Be careful here to not put something in this category which is actually important. For example, today for me this was planning a trip happening much later in the year, packing the car even though my husband agreed to do it and getting sucked into a Facebook Group on hiking.

Step 2: Create a new schedule using your priorities

Most people spend most of their time on Urgent tasks, which means they neglect the Important ones. When we do not prioritize correctly, we find that our time is used by others.

Here’s how to change your schedule so you spend more time on the things that are important to you:

1. Be deliberate about your daily choices

If tomorrow it is important to be engaged in a long meeting, is it more important for you to sleep and be rested or wake up early and take a morning walk? It’s a choice that is personal but you can’t make this choice without a little bit of planning.

Before you go to bed, write down your schedule for the next day.

Think about and write down the time you will get up, the time you will leave the house and so on. Think about what you will do for each hour of the day. Be purposeful about your daily choices.

2. Re-write your task matrix daily

If you know you have one thing that is critical to do, then put it in the Urgent and Important quadrant. Think through what is required. Is it vital that you have lunch with your daughter or call your sister? If you’ve made your schedule, you’ll know what time you have available and the trade-offs you are making with your time. This schedule will help you stay accountable
to the actual amount of time you have to do tasks.

If, for example, you are going to be at your son’s ballgame all day, then you most likely cannot spend time writing out a business case which often takes all day, so you’ll have to move that to a different place on your matrix. If this business case is critical, then how are you going to get it done? What trade-offs are you willing to make? Consider that while this may be Important, it may not be Urgent and can wait until tomorrow or the next day.

Keep your Matrix with you, and review it 2-3 times during the day. Use an Evernote template to keep it online, or simply write it down each day on a sheet of paper.

Tips for coaches
As a coach, it is your job to help your client think through the urgent and important items. An excellent way to do this is to have them keep track of the number of Urgent and Important tasks they have in a week. Your goal is to help them reduce the number of “Urgent & Important” tasks to 1-3 a week (not a day!). Emergencies happen but they should not happen every day.