When prioritizing your to-do list for the day or week, do you evaluate each task by considering if it is urgent vs. important?
One of the most important skills leaders can develop to help them manage their workloads and that of their teams is how to differentiate between important tasks and urgent tasks. In many work environments, the tyranny of the urgent can create a sense of too much work that has to be accomplished immediately.
Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Though quoting someone else when he said it, the decision-making process became known as the Eisenhower Matrix:
Davidjcmorris, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The matrix helps establish how to prioritize tasks, but not as helpful for evaluating which tasks go in which categories. While a task may be urgent and important for someone, it may not fall to you to drop everything and help complete it. For example, if a colleague needs help on a project that’s due today, that might be something you don’t need to do or something to delegate to another team member. However, if your boss needs urgent help, you may need to reschedule your work to ensure that your team or function doesn’t suffer.
As you develop your ability to manage your workload, the Eisenhower Matrix or some version of it can be very useful in planning your day, week, and even longer periods. To help you decide which tasks go into which categories, here are six tips:
How to Know if Something is Urgent vs Important
1. Consider Deadlines
Whether something is urgent or important is primarily driven by whether it has a deadline that is imminent or has already passed. Urgent matters must be handled immediately. If possible, they should be dealt with today. Something that’s important may have a deadline, but it’s typically further out and manageable. Don’t let that deadline sneak up on you, or that task will also become urgent!
2. Evaluate True Urgency
Just because someone says something is urgent doesn’t mean it is. Consider what might happen if you do not meet the deadline. If the consequences are insignificant, is the task truly so urgent that it needs to usurp every other task on your “to-do” list?
3. Count the Tasks
When you start your day, categorize your tasks according to the matrix and count the ones in the first quadrant. If you put most of your work in the first box or even the first and second boxes but leave the third and fourth quadrants mostly empty, you likely need to pause and think about why your matrix is so lopsided.
4. Prioritize
As you sort your tasks, ask yourself questions to help you prioritize. Does this task help accomplish my goals? Does this align with my job description? Does this matter to my boss, or will this have a significant impact on my organization? Questions like these can help you evaluate whether something is urgent, important, or possibly neither.
5. Delegate
You cannot do everything! Delegation is a vital skill for any manager or leader for several reasons. Yes, delegation will help you manage your workload, but it will also help your team develop skills critical to their career development. Look at your urgent and important tasks and think about how to delegate some of them to team members.
6. Eliminate
Classification of any task as one you can eliminate can be a difficult undertaking., but the truth is that we all have such tasks in our day. Some are tasks we choose or habits we indulge in that aren’t necessary or important; others are tasks others ask of us that are not our responsibility, nor do they add value to our organization. Be honest—what tasks are you performing that you can put in this fourth quadrant for elimination?
If you find yourself drained of energy, frustrated in your work, or lacking work-life integration, consider evaluating your tasks according to the above matrix. It’s easy to get caught up in one urgent task after another and find that important tasks continually get pushed aside—at least until they become urgent, too! Often, if we step back and analyze how we’re spending our time, we can find tasks to delegate or eliminate and better assess an accurate level of urgency.
Self-check:
- What is one recurring task that I can delegate?
- What is one bad habit that I can eliminate to free up time?
- Is there one source of most urgent requests that I get? Can I help that source recalibrate levels of urgency or reassess what’s important?
