The Eisenhower Matrix
Today I really want to talk about something that we really dive deeply into on my new course, Scale Your Service System, and that is the Eisenhower matrix. It’s something that I think is important and very necessary for everyone to be applying to their lives, to their work, or to everything in general, especially solopreneurs.
The Eisenhower matrix allows us to figure out what is important versus what is not. It helps us distinguish what’s urgent and what’s not. It makes us prioritize our to do list, accordingly. It’s a matrix just like this. To set it up, you’d have your x axis and your y axis, right? And in one quadrant, we have things that are both urgent and important. In another quadrant, we have things that are important but not urgent. Then, we have things that are not important and not urgent.
You can just throw things in whatever box but basically, you're deciding and looking at your to do list thinking: this task that I need to get done or this problem that has just popped up or this email that has just appeared in my inbox, you're asking yourself, Is this important? Or is this not important? Is this going to have an impact on me on my life on my business and what level of impact does this have right? That’s why it's a matrix so you can kind of decide some things between two things that are important, but one is more important than the other, right? You can prioritize them as you want or number them or use the matrix but you are deciding and you're really thinking about you're giving thought to is this actually important or do I just want this to feel important, right? Similarly, is this urgent or is this not urgent?
We all have a lot of things that kind of come into our day or try to come into our day that are maybe they're they feel urgent, but they're not important, right? Those are emails or questions or slack messages that are popping up and so they feel timely and time sensitive because they're kind of right there in your face. That makes them feel urgent because they’re popping up in front of you. Right? But they might not be important at all, right? Just because it feels urgent but it's not important has no larger impact on your business versus maybe doing something that is obviously if something is both important and urgent, we want to put that at the top of the priority to-do list. What most what happens most of the time is we take care of the urgent and not so important items before the important but not so urgent items because they feel good, am I right? They make us feel productive, like we're checking off the list. I can just like bust out like 10 small things right after the other, I feel so productive. But none of those things were impactful for the business versus if I must do something that is important that is going to have a really big impact on the business. And I have to kind of sit down and do it. It's going to take a little bit more time. It's much more important than those things and it might not be urgent, right? This might be like planning, this might be like setting up your SOPs, things that you know, might not need to happen right this second but they are going to have a big impact on your business. Right. And those are a lot of the times the things that we tend to procrastinate on a little bit. And those are really the things that are probably going to have a really big long term impact on your business, right.
Obviously things that are urgent and important, like an issue that you know, with something for a client or something like that, obviously that is going to be urgent and important. You're gonna want to take care of that right away, right? But really take a look at and be thoughtful about those items that are important but not urgent, right? Or they're not important and urgent and really feel those things out because obviously things that are important and urgent we want to take care of right away right? But then you might want to then prioritize prioritize things that are important but not urgent, and that can be really hard. You have to be super mindful and are doing those things, right. And then maybe you hit on me and urgent and not important, right? And those are the easy things.
Those could even be things that you delegate to a VA or something like that, right. They might still need to get done, but they're really not that important than the things that are not urgent and not important. Those are usually the things you just don't want to waste time doing for the most part, or you definitely want to delegate those things. And those are the things that are just not going to make a big impact on the business. They don't need to get done anytime soon, right. They're not inhibiting you running the business. Those are really the things that we want to make sure we're not kind of wasting our time on doing right. So what I would really encourage you to do is if you have a really long to do list if your click up task management system has a million things on it. Go through and try and drop and assign those tasks into one of these quadrants and prioritize what you're gonna focus on from there, right? A lot of times the important and urgent stuff or the urgent and not important stuff, we might not even be able to plan for that kind of stuff. It may be things that just pop up and we have to deal with them as they come which is fine. But if you are thinking about your to do list in this way, you're going to be able to more easily juggle things around when those urgent things pop up that need to get taken care of and you can reshuffle your priorities reshuffle your to do list accordingly, so that it's not blowing up your week. It's not blowing up your schedule, right you can still get things done, but you're really prioritizing in a much more mindful way. Right and it's a great way to see okay, this urgent but not important thing. Is popping up a lot of the time. How do we prevent that? Do we need an FAQ page happening? Right? Do we need to maybe create an email funnel so that people are getting this information before they're asking us for it? Do I need to have a VA take care of this? Do I need to automate this a little bit right? That's also going to be a way that you can dig into a little bit more information. How do we prevent the not urgent and not important things? Right?
If you're seeing those crop up a lot, how do we take care of that without it taking our time and attention? And that's really the next level of utilizing this Eisenhower matrix. It's not only going to help you with your to do list or task list, but it's also going to help you spot things that you need to maybe automate or systematize or set up a process around or delegate or make an adjustment so that those things are not popping up. So that you or your team is not spending time on them consistently and constantly. So I really encourage you to take a look at your to do list if you have one that feels like it's never ending and put things into this matrix into their corresponding box and kind of just see what comes up there. Right. And you might realize, and you can even do this with tasks that you've already completed so that you can start to see a watch spending a lot of time and the urgent but not important box. What do I need to do to make sure that I stopped spending that much time there right what do I need to do about that? And you can really do some self-reflection there along with tracking your time to figure out where you can improve and spend your time a little bit more wisely as a business owner, right. I hope this was helpful. And if you found this helpful, I want to learn a little bit more about this about how to be a more effective business owner.
I recommend you check out my course scale your service system, and it's designed to help service-based business owners scale to their first six figures and beyond. And we really go into teaching you how to really be effective business owner with information just like this, so that you can see how you should be prioritizing your time and your tasks how your team should be prioritizing their time and their tasks, and how you can make sure that you are running your business in a way that's going to make you help you to scale really effectively and efficiently. So if you have any questions about scale your services DM me if you want to learn more. There is a link in my bio on Instagram Sam DiNicola. In addition, there is also a page with more information on my website, SamDiNicolaDigital.com.
I hope this was really, really helpful. If you have any questions, go ahead and shoot me a DM on Instagram. I'm Sam DiNicola and as always, make sure you leave a review for this podcast every single month we choose one reviewer to receive a free coaching call with me. It's obviously the cheapest but the best way to get my eyes on your business. If you're struggling to prioritize.
