← Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
The Eisenhower Matrix – Decision-making in the White House
00:14:26
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- [00:01]
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Everything needs to be done now. Or ideally sooner. So, given you've a to do list longer than an 80s saxophone solo, how do you decide what needs to be done now and what can wait? And how do you take care of the stuff that needs doing now, while not neglecting the things that make it worth getting out of bed in the morning? The answer lies with something overheard by the 34th President of the United States over 7070 years ago. Can it still work for us today? I'm Mark Stedman and this is Undo, where we look at productivity methods through the ages and try to separate the brilliant from the bullshit so you can build a system that works for you. Somewhere in your life there exists a list of all the stuff you've got to do this week. Some of it probably lives safely in your head, I don't doubt. For example, you forget to brush your teeth. Some of it probably lives at work. And I bet most of that is just in your email inbox. But I further bet there's a bunch of stuff you know you should do, you want to do you feel you have to do that's bobbing up and down in your brain like a determined poop in the proverbial U bend. If we don't have a system for organizing all these little jobs, we end up firefighting or procrastinating, doing the stuff for the people screaming the loudest, or doing the stuff that feels like work because it ticks a box but doesn't actually affect anything. Like convincing Google you're not a robot 30 seconds after it asked the last time. And thus Eisenhower and his matrix General Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Ike as he would come to be nicknamed, was the 34th president of the United States. He was the third of seven sons, all of whom were called Ike. Dwight was Big Ike. His younger brother Edgar was Little Ike. But by the end of World War II, only the general would continue to be called Ike. A Republican from humble beginnings, he wasn't a gifted academic, at least not to begin with. He consistently finished towards the bottom end of rankings at university, but would go on to excel, especially when it came to military strategy. The matrix idea all stems from a speech he gave in 1954 to the General assembly of the World Council of Churches. These mad lads got to hear the basis of an idea that would be extended by Stephen Covey in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
- [02:37]
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Now, my friends of this convocation, there is another thing we can hope to learn from your being with us. I illustrate it by quoting quoting the statement of A former college president, and I can understand the reason for his speaking as he did. I am sure President Miller can. This president said, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. Now this, I think, represents a dilemma of modern man. Your being here can help plan, place the important before us and perhaps even give the important the touch of urgency. And you can strengthen our faith.
- [03:18]
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And that's it. The rest comes from Stephen Covey. And the idea goes like this. You draw two lines on a piece of paper, a horizontal one and a vertical one, so you can divide the paper up into four quarters. This also creates two axes. A horizontal one which we can label urgency, and a vertical one we can label important. So now our quadrants contain space for four different categories of task. Urgent and important. Important but not urgent. Urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. If you're struggling to visualize this, imagine a small town. We'll call it Productivia. Actually, that sounds a bit like a natural yoghurt. Let's go for D. Dutopia. In our town, we have a fire station for the urgent and important, a courtroom for the important but not urgent, a jail for the urgent but unimportant, and a saloon for the stuff that's neither urgent nor important. Now imagine your tasks for the week riding into Dutopia. Where do they go? If they're anything like the tasks the rest of us are dealing with, they'll be all over the map. But most of the tasks you'll actually get done will come from the firehouse or the jail or the urgent half of the grid, because that's the stuff that screams the loudest. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But meanwhile all those other tasks, those important, maybe long term, less sexy or less immediately gratifying tasks, get bumped to tomorrow, and then the next day, and the day after that, and so on and so on, until you surrender to the fact you'll never actually do all the things. Just like Netflix, you'll never reach the end. There's always, always more crap to catch up on. Listen, it's a fact of life and a tenet of this podcast that you're never going to get it all done. The best you can do is treat your to do list like a river, to dip into it from time to time and let stuff flow past. That idea comes from a book by Oliver Berkman and is the topic of a future episode. So, given we can't get it all done, we have to make some Tough decisions and take a longer view. Because if we spend all of our time in the left half of the grid, we end up on a hamster wheel, spinning and spinning and only taking care of the present. But if we rotate our focus 90 degrees, we can begin to think about what's important, not just what's urgent. If your house is full of mango, you know those Japanese comics from the 1980s? Tidying them up and getting your space back is important, but it only becomes urgent if you're flying to Japan and you can't find your passport. If you have a blog about your travels in Japan and the website goes down, that's an urgent problem. But unless that blog is about how to keep websites from crashing, it's probably not important, so you shouldn't be spending undue time on it. So often, though, it's those sorts of problems that end up hijacking our day. So the Eisenhower Matrix exists to help us put these sorts of problems into buckets. These buckets map directly onto our four quadrants. The do it now bucket is for the jobs that are both both important and urgent. I need to catch this flight, but I can't find my passport because it's buried under piles of Japanese comics. The do it later bucket is for jobs that are important, but there's no time pressure, like learning how to say can I use your bathroom? In Japanese. The delegated bucket is for the stuff that needs to be taken care of now, but doesn't define you, like fixing your broken website. If you work for yourself, do you really want to spend your billable hours fiddling with WordPress? Or would it be better to pay someone with an expensive laptop and an anxiety disorder £100 to sort it out so you can get back to the stuff you can invoice for? And then finally, there's the deleted bucket. This is for the stuff that's neither urgent nor important in the grand scheme of things. It's stuff that just doesn't need doing, like finding exactly the right shade of red for the icon of your travel blog. It doesn't need to be done now and it's not actually going to impact anything. So stop. Stop it at once. Oh, but if only it were that easy. I know it feels as though if something's landed on your desk, it needs doing, especially if it's something someone else has asked you to do. So how can we tell how important and urgent a piece of work is the answer to that in just a tick? This podcast is supported directly by you. If you'd like to show your support for Undo and keep it free of ads, you can become a member of the Undo Book Club over at Undo FM Club. In return, you'll get extra bonus podcast content and every month I'll deliver an in depth review of a much lauded self help book so you can extract all the good stuff without the waffle. This month we're doing Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Membership costs $5 a month and all the info you could ever need is at Undo FM Club. Okay, let's get back to it. So a new problem's just landed on your desk, and a potentially disruptive one. How can we easily tell what's important and what's urgent? First off, remember you're not responsible for how other people manage their time. Their disorganization is not your problem, so you get to make your own judgment. That doesn't mean you can be an officious jerk about it, unless that's your whole vibe, but you can calmly explain that your plate is full right now and you'll get to their thing as soon as you can. This does not apply if you're a knee surgeon and someone's come in with their leg on backwards. But as someone who's had bosses, clients and customers for over 20 years, I can tell you you'd be surprised how many apparently mission critical jobs people chuck in your inbox that remain undone and go unnoticed. Like Big Ike says, the urgent is never important. Now, if it's your own stuff you're trying to categorize, try and think about it in the long term. Will the thing on your list actually improve your situation, or might it just be busy work? Is picking the right digital camera more important than learning the basics of how to compose a shot? But don't discount your hobbies in all of this. Don't think that just because there isn't an ultimate end goal that an activity isn't important. You might want to learn to sing, but have no intention of performing outside of the monthly office karaoke. And finally, showing Janet from Accounts Receivable what I Will Survive is supposed to sound like. The point being, if something is genuinely important to you and it'll be important to you in a few months time, keep it on the list. But if it really doesn't get you anywhere and it doesn't recharge your batteries, get rid of it. But that's easy enough to say if you live in a world where you have a virtual assistant on tap that you can throw jobs at. Most of us don't, so we have to make a tougher call. Bottom line, if a job needs doing but you're not the best person for it, if you can afford to pay someone to do it, do that. They'll do it better in less time and hopefully with less stress. If you can't afford to pay someone, aim for the bare minimum. Let's say it's your website, it's gone down and you can't afford to pay someone to figure it out. What would be the quickest way to get something up so that when someone clicks through from Google they don't see an error message? It doesn't have to be a long term fix. Maybe you can sellotape something together until you find a more permanent solution, and you might even find that that later down the line that temporary fix is holding up just fine. All right, this all feels a little bit hypothetical, so let's look at some examples. These come courtesy of productivitypatrol.com and you'll find a link to the full article along with lots of other resources at Undo FM Eisenhower or click the link in the Show Notes if you don't want to spend half an hour figuring out the spelling so important and urgent jobs these could be paying overdue bills, fixing a broken pipe, buying food when you've run out, or getting to a job interview. Important but not urgent jobs would be things like household chores, planning your weekly meals, getting some exercise, and chilling out. Another tenet of this podcast is that rest is action. Urgent but not important jobs include dealing with social media notifications or answering phone calls when you should be relaxing or running an errand for a friend. Well, you should be at work. And jobs that are neither urgent nor important include doom scrolling social media, browsing Amazon for deals on things you don't need, or watching Love Island. Alright, so that's the theory. Let's get a bit more practical. I'm going to assume you have all of your to dos in an app where you can tag them and put dates against them. If you're a paper person, this is just going to take a bit longer. If you can, set an urgency score and an importance score for each of the jobs you've got on for this week. For bonus points, order them so the most important and the most urgent come first and then scroll right down to the bottom and look at the dregs. Ask yourself does this need to be done? Would it be a really good use of my time and would doing it make my life more comfortable or more fun? If you answered no to two of these questions, you have my permission to scrub it from your list and replace it with something that'll actually make your life better. Life runs a lot smoother when you can mix up the things you have to do with the things you want to do. So give yourself a bit of time today to go through your list, figure out what needs doing now, what you can do later, what could be done better by someone else, and what ain't never getting done. So does this idea work for you? Can you see yourself plotting out your week's tasks and categorizing them in terms of urgency and importance? Does it fit with the way you currently handle your to do list? Will it save you time? Or is it just procrastination by productivity? Maybe give it a couple of weeks and see if it sticks. And if it does, you know who to thank. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. The voice of President Eisenhower was generated by AI from a speech he gave elsewhere in the same year. I only used the words he's directly quoted on. You can find links to more resources at Undo fm, which is also where you can sign up to receive new episodes directly into your inbox. Next Monday, we'll be examining the principle that says work expands to fill the time allotted, and what year you can do to smash the capitalist structure that keeps you doing busy work.