How many times have you struggled to make a decision?
With so many decisions to make in our lives, it is tempting not to make any of them! However, making decisions is a requirement of many jobs, especially high levels positions. In the United States, there is no higher office than the President. They face high-stakes situations every day, which means the need for an effective decision-making system is vital. To be successful, one mid-20th Century President created a unique approach to decision making that remains useful to this day.
Dwight D. Eisenhower served as President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Before that he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, overseeing the D-Day invasion. With all that responsibility, Eisenhower had to develop a streamlined approach to make decisions quickly. His technique became known as the Eisenhower Box.
Author James Clear wrote an article on his website to explain this simple, yet powerful approach. Here is how he describes the options in the Eisenhower Box.
Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is simple. Using the decision matrix below, you will separate your actions based on four possibilities.
- Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
- Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
- Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
- Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
One component of the Eisenhower Box that needs clarification is the difference between urgent and important. Clear shares the following understanding.
Urgent tasks are things that you feel like you need to react to: emails, phone calls, texts, news stories. Meanwhile, in the words of Brett McKay, “Important tasks are things that contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals.”
Another feature of the Eisenhower Box is that it is a powerful tool to eliminate unnecessary items. Often people approach productivity systems as a method to accomplish everything that comes their way. Eisenhower shows us through his box that many things are simply not worth the effort to complete. Clear adds to this idea.
Too often, we use productivity, time management, and optimization as an excuse to avoid the really difficult question: “Do I actually need to be doing this?” It is much easier to remain busy and tell yourself that you just need to be a little more efficient or to “work a little later tonight” than to endure the pain of eliminating a task that you are comfortable with doing, but that isn’t the highest and best use of your time.
To learn more about the Eisenhower Box and how it can be used to make faster and more meaningful decisions, please read the rest of James Clear’s article.
