How to stop wasting time
Ever feel like you're doing stuff and yet not moving forward? Dwight Eisenhower has tips to help get out of that situation.
Leonard:
Wait, what have you been doing for the past six months?
Raj: You know, checking email, updating my Facebook status, …
If you’ve ever spent a day doing things, and yet not getting anywhere, Raj’s feeling in The Big Bang Theory should be familiar. And I assume that if you’ve worked ten days in your life, at least one must have been spent in such a restless and yet useless way.
On a personal level, doing things and not moving forward can mean doing trivial tasks all day long: answering emails, updating documentation, and so on. The same happens on an organizational level too: whole companies can be working hard on a product, delivering features, and yet not moving forward. This is often due to confusing urgent tasks for important ones, and focusing on the former at the expense of the latter. The Eisenhower Matrix can help solve that problem.
The Eisenhower Matrix
In 1945, Dwight Eisenhower had around 1.5 million troops under his command, so it’s fair to assume he knew a thing or two about prioritization. From his comments about that topic was created the Eisenhower Matrix, which classifies tasks along two axes: their urgency and importance.
Accordingly, the matrix yields four quadrants:
Urgent / Important: The Fires. Crises, critical bugs, important clients, and actual fires. These are things that require your immediate attention
Non-urgent / important: The Value. Future products, team health, process improvement: important tasks but not urgent since no one asks for them. This quadrant is the most important and yet often neglected
Urgent / non-important: The Attention Grabbers. Email and other trivia which call for your immediate attention, but do not require it
Non-urgent / non-important: The Time Wasters. Anything that no one is waiting for and is not going to move your business forward
The critical thing to note is that not everything urgent is important, and not everything important is urgent. Email, by its nature, is urgent: it pops up on your desktop, makes noise, and calls for your immediate attention. But how much of it is important?
The problem is that, since urgent tasks are calling for our attention, it’s all too easy to get lost in them at the expense of the important ones.
The problem with urgent tasks
Everything urgent is, by definition, nagging us for attention. More importantly, urgent tasks are relatively “comfortable”: they are often short, well-defined, and give a tangible sense of achievement. Again, take the example of emails: once a message has been answered, the task is done. Fixing a minor bug or shipping a small improvement on a product is also in this category.
A person or company spending their time tackling urgent tasks will always have the impression of delivering, of being active. But like one rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, they won’t be moving forward in any meaningful sense.
Everything valuable starts as non-urgent
On the other hand, you have the quadrant of non-urgent but important tasks, where everything valuable starts. By definition, if it’s new and original, nobody will be banging on the door asking for it: they don’t know yet that they want it. New products start there, as do many critical initiatives for a company: minding team health, improving processes, and so on.
The future of your company depends on moving forward on these tasks and ultimately getting them to market, and yet they are so easy to overlook: after all, you have all of this urgent stuff that needs to be done, right now!
By its nature, this quadrant is exceptionally uncomfortable. It’s hard to know, for the non-urgent, what you need to do and when. Indeed, nothing in that quadrant needs to be done: no one is waiting for any of it.
Besides, you won’t get as big a feeling of achievement when working on these tasks. Imagine spending a day working on product strategy: you’re probably moving the needle, but you won’t have anything to show for yourself—you may even feel like you’re moving backward.
A solution
What any person or company should be striving for is spending the most time in the important row, and not the urgent column: this is where the real value is.
But as mentioned, it’s all too easy — and comfortable — to spend all of your time on the urgent. Solving that problem requires a conscious effort, but it’s only three steps:
Eliminate anything non-important
Setup a dual backlog for urgent and non-urgent tasks, and prioritize each one of them
Allocate time for non-urgent tasks, and stick to your plan
First, eliminate non-important stuff
Before doing anything else, you should go through your backlog, your task list, or wherever you do your planning. Review all of your items and ask yourself: if you did that, where would it bring you? Would it change your path for the better?
Be honest about that. Of course, fixing a minor bug is valuable, but is it the most important thing you could be doing, right now?
Then, be ruthless in dropping (or, if you’re so lucky, delegating) everything that’s not important. You can still keep these tasks if it makes you feel better, but put them in a separate registry: set them aside, and get back to them when (and if) you have time.
Second, setup a dual backlog
When you’re left only with the important, you’ll still have urgent and non-urgent, and, as discussed before, these are different animals altogether. For that reason, I recommend setting up a dual backlog for the urgent and the non-urgent — the why will make sense in the next point.
Put your urgent tasks in one, and your non-urgent ones in the other. Then, prioritize both in the most objective way possible (one tool I like for that is ICE, where you rank each task for Impact, Effort, and Confidence). You won’t have resources to do everything, so it’s important to start with the highest priority items. As you move ahead, you may very well discover that the tasks at the bottom of the backlogs weren’t crucial, after all.
Third, allocate time for non-urgent tasks
Non-urgent tasks will never call for your attention, while urgent ones will. An average person will tend to drop the non-urgent, even if it is the most valuable. The only solution I know to this problem is to allocate time for non-urgent tasks. Something around 30–40% seems reasonable: you’ll still have plenty of time to tackle the urgent while leaving meaningful chunks of time for the non-urgent.
Once you’ve done that, be serious about it. Spend the time you allocated on the important stuff, even if urgent tasks are calling for your attention.
Also, working on non-urgent tasks may not give you as clear a sense of achievement as urgent ones. To solve that, it helps to use a management tool such as OKRs. Tie the completion of your important tasks to key results, to help you track your progress and alleviate the feeling of not having anything to show for yourself.
Wrapping up
So there you have it, in a couple of words: drop everything non-important, and allocate time for the non-urgent.
Tools to help you get there are legion. Use ICE to prioritize your backlogs, use OKRs to track progress on the non-urgent but important tasks, and so on. But at its core, the lesson is simple: urgent tasks will call for your attention but may or may not be important. Be sure to make the difference and not succumb to their siren’s call.
