To have better time management it is important that we prioritize the tasks we perform and today I want to share with you the Eisenhower matrix that will allow us to work on prioritizing tasks and is applicable to any area of our lives.
To understand: this matrix is a tool that allows us to manage tasks by organizing them according to their importance and urgency, with this tool you can divide tasks into four quadrants according to which tasks you will do first and which you will do later, the tasks that you can delegate and those that you can eliminate since in some way they are simply a waste of time.
To start working with this quadrant of priorities, you need to make a list of the pending tasks. After this, by processing this Eisenhower matrix again, we can distinguish very clearly which are the important and urgent tasks. And so we can organize the day and workflow. That is what we will learn next.
A very interesting question arises: what is the difference between urgent and important tasks? When you learn to differentiate these two types of tasks, you have almost everything solved since it is essential to make this difference, it helps us identify those tasks on which we should focus and which we can address at another time. For example: urgent tasks are those that must be attended to immediately, if we do not carry out these tasks now we may face specific consequences, especially if we do not finish these tasks in a specific time, these are those tasks that cannot be avoided, An example could be: the completion of a job, a project on a specific date and time, the urgent attention of a client or, for example, repairing a water pipe that has broken, these are some cases that require immediate attention.
In the case of important tasks, we refer to those that do not necessarily need to be attended to immediately but addressing them allows us to achieve our long-term objectives. Although these are tasks that are not urgent, but they are important and we must plan to carry them out so that we use our resources efficiently, some examples could be: working with a customer database, performing maintenance work in a certain sector, These tasks must be carried out but not necessarily immediately. Once you identify these two types of tasks you can start working with the Eisenhower quadrant.
Quadrant 1 (IMPORTANT AND URGENT)
We can call this quadrant the do quadrant since urgent and important tasks are placed here. When we go through our entire to-do list, here we will place those that must be done at this very moment and that if we do not do them, they have very serious consequences. clearly affecting our objectives. The tasks that are placed here are generally those that we have no doubt about because they are the first that come to our mind and are the ones that cause the most stress as well as causing procrastination.
Quadrant 2 (IMPORTANT NOT URGENT)
In this quadrant we can place those tasks that are not urgent but have a high level of importance, these would be the tasks that would affect our long-term objectives but we do not necessarily have to do them immediately. This quadrant must be completed after the first quadrant.
Quadrant 3 (URGENT NOT IMPORTANT)
Here we can place those tasks that we can delegate since they are urgent but not important tasks. These tasks, although they have to be done now, do not affect our long-term objectives. These tasks are generally ones that we do not have the specific skills to perform and that is why we can delegate them to other team members to carry them out.
Quadrant 4 (NOT URGENT NOT IMPORTANT)
after having completed the previous three quadrants we must complete this last one. Here the tasks that do not belong to any of the previous three quadrants will be completed, this means that they are the tasks that are not important or urgent. Generally these tasks are of little importance and only generate distractions, they are an obstacle to achieving our objectives, we must simply eliminate these tasks.
I hope that in this way you can put into practice the use of this priority quadrant, I am sure that it will help you prioritize tasks and be much more productive without stress and gradually eliminating the habit of procrastination and thus achieving your goals. goals.