Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong.

If you are familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, you will know that quadrant 2 (important and not urgent) is the quadrant we should be spending more time. Yet, circumstances and daily priorities prevent us from doing so.

For those of you not familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, below is an illustration of how it works.

Essentially we need to be reducing the amount of time we spend in quadrants three and four and maximising our time in quadrants one and two.

Now, if you sit down on a weekend, look at the matrix and plan out the week, it’s very easy for us to adhere to the principles. But unfortunately, when Monday morning comes around and we enter our workspace, almost immediately, we are swamped by quadrant three tasks. They are loud, noisy and don’t stop. Before we know it, it’s 4:30 pm, and it’s time to begin wrapping up for the day.

If you froze your day at that moment and looked at what you had done, you’d be alarmed at how much time you had spent in quadrants one and three. Nothing having been accomplished from the all-important quadrant two.

How can you prevent this from happening?

The thing about quadrant two tasks is they are not urgent. They don’t scream at you to be done, and if you skipped one for a day or two, your world would not come crashing down. So when quadrant one and three tasks start rolling in, we feel obligated to deal with these first simply because they are noisy and theoretically urgent.

Jim Rohn often spoke about this when he discussed the secrets to success. he hit the nail on the head with this:

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practised every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”

The only way you will consistently do your quadrant two tasks is by scheduling them in your calendar.

For example, exercise is a quadrant two task. Maintaining your health, vitality, and energy is crucial to leading a vibrant life. Yet, if we skipped exercise for a day or two, it would not be a catastrophic failure. We can easily pick it back up. Yet if that day or two becomes a month or two and then a year or two, you’ve repeated an error in judgment every day for a few years. Now your health will suffer.

If you’re not scheduling your exercise, it will not happen. Daily “urgent” events will replace exercise every time. It’s the perfect excuse not to exercise.

Planning is another quadrant two task that is frequently neglected. Yet if you never plan your day or week, how do you know you are moving in the direction you want to go? Do you even have a plan? If you never plan anything other than your next holiday, your life will drift like an abandoned ship on the high seas — being tossed and turned by random waves and storms.

Scheduling ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to plan what needs to be done tomorrow (quadrant one tasks) and making sure you have your quadrant two tasks scheduled is a guaranteed way to confirm you are moving in the right direction for your goals and helping to keep you from being overwhelmed by quadrant three tasks.

By their very nature, quadrant one tasks don’t need scheduling. You often have no idea they will be coming at you, and because they are loud, you will not forget them when they do arise. Quadrant three tasks need to be eliminated as much as possible. These often disguise themselves as quadrant one tasks, but you will quickly see through the disguise with practice. For instance, most emails you receive are quadrant three tasks disguised as quadrant one. But when faced with these, we often let them through into quadrant one because deciding the real urgency of something is hard.

If you want to balance your different tasks and not get pulled down a rabbit hole of low-value, busy-work tasks, establish your quadrant two tasks. The tasks that will make you a better, stronger person and leave you feeling fulfilled and energised. Once established, schedule the time for doing these tasks on your calendar and make sure you do them.

After all, As Jim Rohn said:

“It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”

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