Make your day more Productive by this Method!!

Dwight David Eisenhower was the united state’s 34th president, who served two terms from 1953 to 1961. He launched programs that directly lead to the development of the Interstate highway system in the United States, created NASA, signed into the law the first major piece of civil rights legislation since the end of the civil war, welcomed Alaska and Hawaii into the union and managed to keep up the cold war with Russia.
Before joining the presidency, he was a five star general in the U.S army. He served as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during world war 2.

Eisenhower was Gallup’s most admired man of the year no less than 12 times!!

Now as you can see, Eisenhower lived one of the most productive lives. In order to know how did he manage to keep up with everything let us take a look at his “EISENHOWER MATRIX”.

Eisenhower matrix, also known as the urgent-important matrix is a visual method of time management. The basic goal of this matrix is to bolster an individual’s productivity. This matrix can be used for broad productivity plans (like for a week or a month) or smaller daily plans.

In a 1954 speech, Eisenhower quoted an unnamed university president, who said ” I have two sorts of problems, the urgent & the important. The urgent are not important and important are never urgent.”

This matrix has been categorized on the basis of two things, urgency, and importance. Urgent and Important tasks demand you take action quickly. These items typically have visible deadlines and consequences for stalling on taking action. Most often, these are either things that were sprung on you from an external source or things that you put off until faced with a looming deadline. Either way, they require a crisis mode response.

Eisenhower used to prioritize his tasks on the basis of four possibilities:

• Do: This category includes tasks that are inevitable. Such chores need to be finished immediately. It is crucial to realize that urgent tasks are not important simply because they are pressing. Spending too much time on such tasks can result in increased stress and burn out and you might end up feeling wasted.

• Decide / Schedule: These are the ones that are important but are not as urgent as the previous one. They can be scheduled to be done later. This is a place where you focus on opportunities and growth rather than the problems. This quadrant is where “deep work” happens because you are largely freed of pressing distractions.

• Delegate: It is where the mere urgency effect lives. They are not important but are surely urgent. These tasks need to be done but don’t require much skill or time. The drive to complete tasks because of real or assumed deadlines means you take on tasks that aren’t actually significant to you. If you can eliminate a task from your to-do list, and ask others to do it, without affecting your business then do so.

• Delete: These chores are neither important not urgent. Like watching Netflix or so. These tasks should be done in the limit as they can be diverting from the tasks which are actually fundamental. These activities don’t contribute to progress on your goals but can end up taking over large chunks of time.

Distraction in moderation is ok, but habitual distraction results in less work satisfaction overall!!

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking indiscriminate thinking.

-Tim Ferris

You don’t need to be busy all day long in order to be productive. By simply eliminating the things you waste time every day, you won’t need any additional tips on how to be more productive.

This impactful method helps you to compartmentalize your thoughts and make realistic decisions. It pushes you to question whether an action is really necessary. If not, it urges you to move the tasks to the delete quadrant rather than mindlessly repeating them. However, the Eisenhower matrix will only help you only if you know what you are working towards. Deciding which tasks to do and which ones to eliminate becomes easier when you are clear about what is important to you.

The Eisenhower principle doesn’t claim to be able to structure and solve all of your tasks by magic. On the contrary, people can & should continue to judge individually what consequences arise from their actions or the postponement of actions.

Try out prioritizing it according to the Eisenhower matrix once. I am not saying it is easy to do at the beginning itself, but I am sure once you know how to prioritize things out, you will be able to manage your time efficiently.