LEADERS PAY ATTENTION TO THE TIME MANAGEMENT MATRIX
Recently, I read a Harvard Business Review daily email that took me back 30 years.
Last week I talked about leadership learning and listed books, podcasts and newsletters that I have found valuable during my own leadership journey. One of those is the Harvard Business Review “Management Tip of the Day.”
Last week, one daily tip was titled “Prioritizing When Everything Feels Urgent.”
This newsletter started this way:
“When everything feels urgent, the pressure to keep things moving and to push you into reactive decisions leaves little room for recovery and reflection. Instead of trying to rank every demand on the fly, focus on making deliberate trade-offs about where your judgment matters most.”
This reminder from HBR got me thinking about the Eisenhower Matrix. That matrix was used by Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II and later in the White House. Stephen Covey used it decades afterwards, calling it the Time Management Matrix and later the Time Matrix.
It is a four-part matrix that divides all items into Important and Not Important and Urgent and Not Urgent.
-The upper left quadrant, Quadrant I, represents items that are important and urgent
-The upper right quadrant, Quadrant II, stands for things that are important but not urgent
-The lower left quadrant, Quadrant III, stands for items that are not important but are urgent
-The lower right quadrant, Quadrant IV, represents items that are neither important nor urgent
Eisenhower and Covey realized that most people spend extensive time in Quadrant I, those activities which are important and urgent.
When busy leaders get exhausted from spending so much time in Quadrant I, they drop down to Quadrant IV, activities, which are neither important nor urgent.
The secret to utilizing this matrix is intentionally striving to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II, working on those activities, which are important, but NOT urgent.
As you might expect, activities in Quadrant II include:
-Getting sufficient quality, sleep,
-Regular exercise,
-Spending time in self-reflection,
-Focusing on a healthy diet,
-Cultivating ongoing and important relationships, and
-Spending time on priority setting.
In so many jobs, we instead spend an inordinate amount of time in Quadrant I, those activities, which are both important and urgent. Ironically, the more time we spend in Quadrant II, the less time we will need to spend in Quadrant I.
It is true that some leaders are urgency addicted.
-They love working under pressure.
-They love having to make important decisions.
-They love pushing up against deadlines.
This may all be satisfying to them, but it does not lead to greater leadership effectiveness. I encourage you to read about the Eisenhower Matrix.
-Envision it in your mind or draw the picture.
-Then think about how you tend to spend your days and weeks.
-Keep track of how you use your time for one week
-Then create personal strategies for how you can use your time more effectively
Also, as an experiment, you can draw the matrix and write in each quadrant what you’ve done that particular day. This exercise forces important self-reflection about how you choose to spend your time.
And most of the time, how we spend our time is indeed our choice.
We can make up stories about how other people are making us spend our time in certain ways, but the great majority of the time those choices are up to us.
So as this week commences, I encourage you to make time to think about how you are choosing to use your time.
What do you like about it?
What do you want to change?
How will you make those changes?
How will you hold yourself accountable for doing so?
It is largely up to you!
If you believe this content would resonate with a friend or colleague, please feel free to forward it along!
-Larry