A recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research set out to examine how people decide
what to work on when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance. It was found that
our attention is drawn to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that are less urgent even when
the less urgent task offers greater rewards - a behavioral trend known as the “Mere-Urgency
Effect”. So How do we decide which task to give our attention to at any given moment?
To answer that, I have to take you all the way back to 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was
elected President of the United States. During his two terms as president, he led the construction
of the Interstate Highway System, created NASA, signed into law the first major piece
of civil rights legislation since the end of the Civil War, ended the Korean War, and
welcomed Alaska and Hawaii into the union. Eisenhower had to make tough decisions continuously
about which of the many tasks he would focus on, on each given day.
In a 1954 speech, he said “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Over 30 years later, Stephen Covey later repackaged Eisenhower’s insights in his book, The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People, into a simple tool to prioritize tasks, known as
the Eisenhower Matrix or Eisenhower Method.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a matrix that splits one’s tasks into 4 clearly demarcated quadrants.
The FIRST QUADRANT of Tasks are tasks that are Important and Urgent.
These are tasks that require you to take action quickly and you need to DO them. They typically
have visible deadlines and consequences for stalling on taking action. Most often, these
are either things that were sprung on you from an external source or things that you
put off until faced with a looming deadline. Either way, they require a crisis mode response.
Now, something that should fit into that first quadrant for you would be to hit that like
button and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this every single week.
The SECOND QUADRANT comprises of tasks that are Important but not Urgent.
We’ll call this the Schedule quadrant. These are tasks that will have you achieve your
long-term goals and you should keep finding time for them and putting them in your calendar.
Examples of this can be your workout routine or building new skills in an area that you
want to. This is the spot where you are focused not on problems like the first quadrant, but
on opportunities and growth. Living in this quadrant of the matrix means that you are
proactive and prioritize activities that grow your skills and energy, and contribute to
accomplishing meaningful goals. Plus, by tending to these tasks consistently, you lessen the
odds of them becoming urgent and moving into the first Quadrant.
The THIRD QUADRANT is Tasks that are not Important, but Urgent.
This includes a lot of busy work like emails, messages, and some routine meetings. Remember
the mere urgency effect that I mentioned earlier. This is where that lives. The drive to complete
tasks because of real or assumed deadlines means you take on tasks that aren’t actually
meaningful to you. Focus on Quadrant 3 tasks may make you feel like you are not living
up your larger life goals or don’t have control over your day-to-day life. The solution
here would be to delegate these tasks to somebody else if that’s possible or communicating
with whomever you’re working with that you aren’t able to take on that task.
And the FOURTH QUADRANT is full of tasks that are Not Important and Not Urgent.
This last quadrant is called ‘delete’. Most of the stuff in this section provides
no real value. These are things that take away time from your goals and are habits like
surfing the internet without reason or completely exhausting your Netflix queue. Not speaking
for myself. LIAR. They give you an excuse for not being able to deal with important
tasks in the 1st and 2nd quadrant. Don’t hesitate to drop certain tasks into this 4th
quadrant if they don’t move you closer to your vision or dream for your life. It’s
ok to just relax sometimes, but activities in this quadrant have diminishing returns
when they’re used excessively.
SO HOW DO WE DISTINGUISH WHAT’S IMPORTANT AND WHAT’S URGENT?
Eisenhower recognized that great time management meant being effective as well as efficient.
In other words, we should spend our time on things that are important and not just the
ones that are urgent. To do this, and to minimize the stress of having too many tight deadlines,
we need to understand this distinction:
Important activities have an outcome that leads to us achieving our long-term missions
and goals, whether these are professional or personal. What is important is subjective
and depends on what matters to you, but these items require planning and thoughtful action.
Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are usually associated with achieving
someone else's goals. They are often the ones we concentrate on and they demand attention
because of the consequences of not dealing with them.
When we know which activities are important and which are urgent, we can overcome the
natural tendency to focus on unimportant urgent activities, so that we can clear up enough
time to do what's essential for our success.
So I hope that using the Eisenhower Method will help you filter the noise from your decisions
and concentrate on what really matters to you. If nothing else, it can help you identify
whether the things that are stressing you out are really that important at all.
As always, Drop a like on this video to support the channel and don’t forget to subscribe
and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss any of the latest videos as soon as they’re
uploaded. Thanks so much for watching. My name is Vihan Chelliah. I’ll see you next
week.