When building your online platform, there are literally dozens of tasks you could or should be doing each day. Your time is precious and you want to be as productive and effective as possible with the finite amount of time you have. It can feel overwhelming just trying to prioritize where to focus or even how to get started.
Enter the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
As the name suggests, this simple yet amazingly helpful tool was created by the US’s 34th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
You can imagine how many important tasks came across his desk everyday. So he created his own tool to manage them.
The matrix consists of 4 boxes:
1 – Important / Urgent
2 – Important / Not urgent
3 – Not important / Urgent
4 – Not important / Not urgent
To use the matrix, simply categorize every task you have into one of these 4 boxes. You may choose to do this at the start of the day, or as a way to finish your workday by planning for the following one.
Once you have categorized your To Do’s, then you:
Do the important and urgent stuff now
Schedule the important non-urgent work
Delegate the non-important urgent tasks
Discard the non-important and non-urgent work
Note: If you don’t have anyone to delegate to let us know – we can give you some tips on how to find affordable and specialized freelancers to delegate some of the urgent but not important tasks to.
That’s all there is to it! And boy does it work, especially if you make it a daily activity.
Not only does this make you start with the work that you really should do first (which isn’t always the stuff you want to do) but it also frees your mind. You don’t have to worry about keeping all the tasks in your head and planning your time because you have put it all down on paper, prioritizing as you go.
If you do this, you might be surprised at how much of a burden you were carrying. It feels good to release and to really zero in on what you need to do now for maximum impact.
Every day, update your matrix, work through the tasks, then begin again with each new day.
Here’s a link to download a template for the Eisenhower matrix. Hope you find this useful!