Productivity or being productive is a major component of achieving your personal and professional goals. When contemplating why you might not be reaching your goals, you might be tempted to only focus on your motivation.
Productivity is equally as important as being motivated. Focus, time management, and task management skills are all components of being productive.
In this post, I’m going to tell you about a super easy method that you can use to prioritize your tasks and get things done in 2020.
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How to Be More Productive in 2020
5 Tips to be More Productive
In this video, I cover these 5 tips that will help you be more productive in 2020.
- Document your To-Do List
- Force Yourself to Focus
- Set Priorities
- Manage Your Time
- Learn to Say No
Grab Your Free Productivity Trello Board at the end of this post.
What is an Eisenhower Matrix?
As the name suggests the Eisenhow matrix inspired by the 34th President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower. He was known for being extremely productive throughout his illustrious career.
Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, used Eisenhower’s insights to develop the Eisenhower Matrix. It can be used to help you set priorities and make decisions relating to the tasks that you need to accomplish.
The Eisenhower Matrix is also referred to as the Urgent-Important Matrix. By using this simple strategy you are in essence sorting out less urgent and important tasks that you can delegate or remove from your to-do list.
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
-Dwight Eisenhower
How to Use the Eisenhower Matrix
STEP 1: The first step in using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks is to document the items you need to do. For example, you may have the following items on your to-do list for today.
- Run daily reports for work
- Purchase concert tickets
- Pick up daughter from school
- Binge-watch The Mandalorian on Disney+
STEP 2: Using the 4 quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix you then categorize each one of your to-do list items.
- Important & Urgent
- Important & Not Urgent
- Not Important & Urgent
- Not Important & Not Urgent
STEP 3: Finally, you will prioritize your tasks based on the 4 quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix. Here’s how it works.
DO – You will do all of the items that you have categorized as important and urgent first.
SCHEDULE – Next you will schedule any tasks that you have categorized as important and not urgent.
DELEGATE – Then, you will try to delegate any items that are in your not important but urgent category.
IGNORE – Finally, you can ignore or put off until the next day any items you have in your not urgent and not important category.
Eisenhower Matrix Example
Using the example tasks from step 1 above, here is how these tasks would be prioritized.
Running your daily reports at work should be classified as important and urgent. It is a task that is apart of your daily job function and not completing this task could be detrimental to your performance at work. This is a task that you would definitely do with a high priority.
Picking up your daughter after school could be classified as important but not urgent. It is important that you pick up your child, however, you have a set scheduled time to do this task.
Purchasing concert tickets can be classified as not important but urgent. You not going to the concert is not a big deal, however, if you want to go you will need to purchase tickets in a timely fashion so that you can get good seats. This is the type of task that you could delegate. Your significant other could easily purchase the tickets for you.
Binge-watching the Mandalorian on Disney + is not important and not urgent. This is something that you would do for enjoyment so it could be done at any time as Disney + is a streaming service.
What’s Important & Urgent?
As you can see using the Eisenhower Matrix depends heavily on how you classify your tasks. It is important to note that each person will classify certain tasks differently.
You may also run into a scenario where you feel that you have tasks that are equally important and urgent. In this situation, you will need to have a firm definition of what important and urgent mean to you.
When determining if a task is important, you should consider if that task has an outcome that will lead to you achieving a goal.
Urgent tasks are slightly easier to identify as they demand immediate attention. The consequences of not dealing with these types of tasks are immediate.
Free Productivity Trello Board
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