Welcome to mindful manager! Today I want to share with you one of my favourite frameworks for a more productive life.
I've always preferred abstract and timeless frameworks to practical hacks, but this method stuck with me for its simplicity and usefulness, so I decided to share it with you. It's called the Eisenhower Matrix, named after the 34th President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, and it should help you be more productive.
A little digression on productivity: while many would define it as generating the most output with your time, I actually think one of the first things a productive person has to learn is knowing where we need to be efficient (maximize the number of tasks we do in a certain period of time) and where we need to be effective (making the best decision possible, regardless of how much time we need). This Matrix supports you in doing that.
You position every task in one of its four quadrants. The x-axis represents urgency, and the y-axis represents importance.
Credits for the image and most of the content go to the amazing Farnam Street Blog.
If a task is not urgent or important, either postpone it or eliminate it altogether. Ask yourself if you really need to complete it, or if you're just keeping yourself occupied to feel productive.
If a task is both urgent and important, do it immediately. Don't wait for the perfect moment or lose too much time in procrastination masked as "preparation". If you need a little bit of training for this, consider starting a habit of daily discomfort (I wrote a post some weeks ago on the topic, using cold showers as an example).
If it's urgent but not important, you need to be efficient. The "Chief Operating Officer" inside you is the one you need here. Schedule some time in the day to go through your list in the most efficient way possible, and consider delegating the task if you can and it makes sense financially.
In the not urgent but important bucket usually lie the most critical decisions of our life, like learning a new high-value skill, deciding your career path, or where you'll live. Since those are never urgent decisions, they always fall in the last places of our weekly to-do lists, behind all the errands we need to complete every day. To move ahead in this area, the only method I found is scheduling some time to do it, regardless of your current busyness.
Nobody is imposing me to write this content, so it would be easier to postpone it to when my tasks list will be empty. But since for me it's important and I think it adds value to my future self, I try (nobody is perfect) to schedule a block of time for it every day.
The goal of my content is to share what I find on the journey towards a clearer mind and a better decision making process. If you want, I’d love to hear your feedback: you can comment here or send me an email at riccardo@caneve.it
Lastly, if you feel like someone you know might benefit from this newsletter, consider sharing it! Thanks a lot, see you next week🤙
Riccardo