Category: Decision Making

The Eisenhower Box: Make Decisions Like a President

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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.

  1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
  2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
  3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
  4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
Notebook displaying Eisenhower urgent-versus-important matrix with four task-priority quadrants
Image created with WordPress AI

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.

The Case for Leadership Wisdom

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AI is everywhere, but will it take over everything?

Fears about AI stealing jobs are real and widespread. When simple prompts can create documents and presentations in mere moments, it seems like no work is safe. However, are their types of knowledge work that AI cannot do?

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, AI struggles to replicate wise leadership. Writers George Hallenbeck and David Altman explored this concept in their article titled, Lost in a Sea of Answers: The Case for Leadership Wisdom. They start the article by setting up the problem.

Leaders can generate more answers in less time than ever before. What’s becoming harder is knowing which answer deserves action, how it impacts others, and where accountability lies once a decision is made.

More answers don’t ensure greater knowledge.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

What leads someone to greater knowledge? It is the result of diving into the information available, processing it, playing around with it, and then putting it into practice. Hallenbeck and Altman believe this is the path to growing wisdom, and it is a journey open to all.

What then is the important trait that allows leaders to thrive? It is the development of leadership wisdom. What do they mean by this idea? As they explain:

Our emerging perspective on leadership wisdom begins with the premise that it isn’t reserved for a select few, nor is it separate from the practice of leadership. Wisdom is a leadership capability that leaders can understand, build, and put to work — starting with what it’s often associated with: judgment and decision-making.

The writers believe that AI can assist leaders with identifying potential solutions to any problem. However, it takes sound judgement and wisdom to decide on the best course of action. AI by its very nature lacks these qualities, but humans can develop it.

AI can’t simply apply leadership judgment and wisdom. It has no way to reflect on a past decision and use what was learned, or empathize with the impact the decision may have on others and factor that into how to proceed. Nor can it engage in the collective sensemaking that infuses raw information with deeper meaning.

To learn more about the concept of leadership wisdom and how to develop it, I invite you to read the entire article.

Protect Yourself from AI

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How much of your information is exposed to AI?

AI has been rapidly moving through our world. Versions of it are integrated into most software and apps. This makes it feel like AI is inescapable. Because of this, many people are wary of exposing their information to AI. Are their ways to keep our data safe without leaving the internet entirely?

A recent article on the Fast Company website is a must read if you are looking to limit exposure to AI. Kevin Lewis, who serves as the Chief Information Security Officer for E78 Partners, wrote an article titled, 4 things you can do to protect yourself from the rising threat of AI. He opens by describing the scope of the problem.

The concern is understandable—and underscored by recent warnings from high-profile AI researchers about the threat of superintelligence. AI is in our home appliances, work products and even attends our meetings. It shapes the apps we use, the content we see, and the messages we receive. Voice assistants listen to our commands, shopping sites predict what we’ll buy next, and AI tools quietly learn from the data we create. Meanwhile, the traditional cybersecurity risks of stolen passwords, compromised accounts, and phishing emails haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve only gotten more sophisticated and harder to spot.

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

To mitigate risk, Lewis provides four ideas on how to avoid exposure to AI. The first is to start limiting your digital footprint.

Remove the apps you never use from your phone, then review app permissions on the ones you do use, opting out of unnecessary data collection where possible.

Always avoid sharing personal details with AI chatbots. Be especially cautious with free AI sites that use your prompts, conversations, or uploaded files to train their systems. Anything you share could be stored, analyzed, or reused in ways you did not intend. Privacy-focused options such as proton.com and duck.ai may be better choices because they are designed to reduce data collection.

To learn the other three approaches, I encourage you to read the rest of the article. Then do your best to apply them across your digital world. Good luck!

Have You Done a Time Audit?

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Where did the time go?

Do you regularly feel like the day got away from you. That long to do list has very little marked off. Even more importantly, have you felt that all your time was spent on unimportant items, leaving the task you truly cared about undone? Perhaps there just isn’t enough time in the day to get things done. Or is there?

In a recent NPR article, psychotherapist Niro Feliciano revealed that people are largely unaware of how they spend their days. We blindly do things of low value while neglecting the more important items. It began for her with a personal epiphany about her own choices. As the article writers share:

“I remember sitting in my office. I had done eight sessions, several with adolescents. And I said, ‘When was the last time I spent 45 minutes listening to one of my kids?'” she says.

She realized that how she wanted to spend her time and how she was really spending it “were very much misaligned,” she says. “I did not see enough of a reflection of things that brought me joy and contentment.”

Photo by Alexander Popadin on Pexels.com

To help herself and her clients make better choices, Feliciano encourages conducting a time audit. The process is simple, but it requires attention to details.

Make a list of the people and the activities that are the most important to you. It might be loved ones like your partner, your kids or your bestie, and hobbies like reading, working out or video-chatting with your long-distance friends. 

Then do a time inventory. Where is your time really going each day? Are the lists matching up? You might find that a lot of your day is spent on obligations, chores and time-sucking activities.

Then look for ways to make your lists reflect each other. Where can you carve out more space for your family? Or set aside a moment for reading?

Once this is done, the next task is to find ways to add in the high value items to your day. Feliciano took her own advice, as she shared with the writers.

To make more time, you’ll need to set some boundaries, Feliciano says. “What are you doing that makes you feel resentful, depleted, exhausted?” And what can you do to limit yourself from those activities?

Feliciano found that she was spending a lot of unnecessary time scrolling on social media — but that wasn’t on her list of priorities, so she cut back.

To learn more about time audits and how to use them to get more value out of your day, please read the rest of the NPR article.

Process Now – Decide Later

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There is a quiet tension in knowledge work. Throughout the day we are constantly getting new inputs, as emails, phone calls, and messages stack up. However, we also must spend time making decisions in order to move forward on our goals and projects. Focus too much on the first and we make little progress on important goals. Focus too much on the later and the stress of overflowing inboxes weighs heavy on our minds. Therefore, must we make a choice? Is one of these more important than the other?

In a post on his Substack page, GTD creator David Allen considered the apparent paradox that knowledge workers face between processing new input and making decisions on objectives. He ultimately finds they are not in conflict at all. That is because they occupy different spaces in workflow. To start with, Allen believes it is important to process new input when it first shows up.

When you put off this thinking for longer than a day (or two or three or more), the more mental effort it will take to reconstruct what that input was about and reduce or eliminate your backlog. Research on memory suggests that if something is more than seven days past, it’s extremely difficult to remember or recreate what happened, and what it’s about. Not a long time. but magnify that by as many unprocessed things you have. If you zero out your in-baskets daily, it’s not such a drain on your energy to get things clear. 

David Allen

Keep in mind that processing an item is not the same as making a final decision on it. While some two-minute rule items can be dispatched quickly, for more complicated projects there is an advantage to delaying a decision. In fact, letting it marinate until the deadline may be more productive in the long run.

There are times and situations in which it could be more productive to wait to engage with making a decision or acting on something until it would be critical if you don’t. This is particularly true when new information is likely to arrive that would change your call. …

On a more subtle and strategic level, it could mean waiting for the environment to shift before making a judgment call that would have lots of impact. 

Allen summarizes this approach in a simple phrase: Clarify fast, decide patiently. Do this and the tension will dissolve as you work with a mind like water.

I invite you to read the full post to understand the relationship between processing and deciding.

Does a 100-Year-Old Productivity Tip Work in the Digital Age?

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Productivity tips are everywhere. Yet, how many of them actually work and will they stand the test of time?

We tend to think that a focus on productivity is an Internet era obsession. However, people have been searching for better ways to do work since the rise of the information professional at the beginning of the 20th Century. As unlikely as it seems, is it possible that a tool from that time period is still useful in the age of AI?

On the Todoist website, editor Anna Sonnenberg recently shared the 100-year-old Ivy Lee Method. It is a technique named after its creator, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, back in 1918. The method is designed to concentrate focus every day on the most important tasks to accomplish through a rank order system. At its heart are four rules, which Sonnenberg describes:

1/ At the end of your day, identify six important tasks you need to do the next day. This number creates a constraint, forcing you to get clear on your priorities. It also limits you to a manageable number of tasks.

2/ Rank tasks by priority and do them in order. If you could only finish one task tomorrow, which would it be? Order your task list from most important to least important. Then, work through them in that order.

3/ Don’t move on until the task is complete. The key to this method is working on one task at a time until it’s finished. This approach helps you fully concentrate on what you’re doing and avoid leaving tasks unfinished.

4/ Move unfinished items to the next day’s list. Each evening, look at what didn’t get done and decide if it still matters. If it does, include it on tomorrow’s list. This daily reset prevents old tasks from piling up.

Ivy Lee

Why would this approach work today? Despite all the emails flying in, our digital reminders popping up, and AI agents set to serve, a knowledge worker must still decide where to direct their focus. With the distractions populating our workplace, the Ivy Lee Method is a way to keep attention on the selected tasks against the cacophony of digital noise. As Sonnenberg shares:

If you’re prone to distraction during the workday like I am, this method helps you hit the ground running in the morning and stay focused throughout the day. All you have to do is pick six tasks and work through them.

Just make sure you create your list the night before. Otherwise, you might get distracted by all the possibilities when you sit down to do the work.

To learn more about the Ivy Lee Method, and most importantly, tips on how to implement it in a digital environment, I invite you to read the rest of the article.

Why Young Professionals Say “No” to Leadership Roles

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We have all heard the standard career advice: start at the bottom, work hard, and get promoted into leadership. Becoming a supervisor or manager has often been seen as an important step on the career path. However, what happens if a person decides that traveling the leadership route is not worth the stress and workload? Is there a way to make these positions more appealing?

In an online post titled, Why Library Workers Are Saying “No” to Leadership Roles, Choice360 contributor Alejandro Marquez shares reasons why some young library professionals choose to stay away from leadership roles. While his focus is on the library profession, many of the factors apply to other professional careers. Among the several workplace issues Marquez cites, one is the arrival fallacy.

The arrival fallacy is the mistaken assumption that a goal or outcome will allow an individual to achieve happiness. In an organization, bosses often promise their workers a reduction in workload or stress simply by hiring new people. Often, there is no reduction as other people leave, positions are frozen, or institutional priorities shift. Instead of a reduced workload, leaders often inherit a backlog of issues, and the initial optimism can quickly fade as they grapple with the same systemic challenges. The cycle of hiring new leaders with the expectation of change, only to see the same problems persist, creates a sense of disillusionment and fuels discontent.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

Does this mean that critical leadership roles will go unfulfilled in the years to come? That does not have to be the future. Marquez suggests several ways that young professionals can be encouraged to view leadership roles in a positive light. A starting point is by ensuring that organizations have carefully considered the concepts of compensation and workload equity.

Leadership roles demand significant time, energy, and expertise. Compensation needs to reflect a workload that accurately represents increased responsibilities. Workload differentials—recognizing that leadership roles often extend beyond a role’s core duties—are essential and must be accounted for. Transparent workload assessments and the equitable distribution of responsibilities are tools that can help this process.

To learn more about the reasons why young library professionals are avoiding leadership roles along with ways to address their concerns, please read the rest of the article.

It’s Not About Project Management

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Do you have challenges with project management?

For knowledge workers, projects are the key items that they work on day in and day out. Yet very few people have thought deeply about what constitutes a project and the best way to tackle them. This can create a vague sense that projects can be handled more efficiently and effectively, but it is not obvious where to start.

Thankfully, David Allen of GTD fame has spent his career thinking deeply about how we actually work and the ways to do it better. In a recent blog post titled, You don’t have a project management problem (you have this instead)…and why it’s such a squishy area, he explores the idea that most people don’t have a clear understanding of their projects.

I was often asked by line managers and training people whether I had a good “project management” seminar for their people. My first response is, “what exactly do you mean by ‘project management’?” Very few have an immediately good answer. They’ve often just heard it as a need from their reports or their constituents. “Do you have people who need to know how to lay out a GANTT chart or detailed critical path for complex projects like constructing a building or implementing a new corporate information system? Or do you have people who feel overwhelmed with the sheer load of things to do, many of which can’t be finished in a single action step?” Usually, it’s some combination of the two, but mostly it’s the latter.

Allen has a very clear definition of a project. It is anything that requires more than one action to complete. These means that most workers have anywhere from 20-50 projects on their plate at a given time. Also, he believes stress related to projects does not arise from the tactics of doing them, but instead the overwhelm of all the potential tasks to do. Therefore, Allen sees two problems to solve. The first is that organizational approaches to project management are either too complex for the project or not encompassing enough. As he states in the piece:

Problem #1 – I’ve never seen any two of those projects that needed the same amount of planning or detailing of steps to get them under control. It ranges from three bullet points on the back of an envelope in a coffee shop (usually your most productive thinking) to days of intensive planning with a dozen people, pages of outlined steps, critical path, the works. So, most single “project management” model will either under- or over-plan most of your projects. There’s no one-size-fits-all.

To learn about the second problem and his overall conclusions on the topic, please read the rest of his post.

The Perils of Probability – The Monty Hall Problem

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Have you ever pondered any of these questions?

  • Should I buy that airline ticket now or wait to see if the price will drop?
  • Should I buy the extended warranty on my used car or risk possible repair costs?
  • Should I buy a ticket for the lottery since the jackpot is very high?

Day after day we have to make decisions based on probabilities. Some choices are as simple as packing an umbrella when it’s an 80% chance of rain. Others are more complicated like how to invest retirement account money amongst many fund options. With the rise of prediction markets, more and more people are putting their money down on sports gambling without fully understanding the odds. Alas, many of those people are losing their bets because humans are very bad at understanding probability.

To learn more about the risks of sport betting, listen to the latest season of the excellent podcast, Against the Rules, from Michael Lewis. (Note – as much as the sports betting commercials try to sell you on it, think twice before betting a parlay!)

I explored the challenges we have with understanding probabilities in an article several years ago called Deal or No Deal, Mr Hall! – How We Misunderstand Probability The centerpiece of the article concerns a much-discussed probability puzzle called The Monty Hall Problem. Here is how the problem is described.

You are a contest on Let’s Make a Deal. Your game is to pick one of three doors. Behind one is a new car and behind the other two are goats. (For purposes of play assume you want the car.) Monty Hall invites you to pick a door, so let’s say you choose Door #1. Monty, who knows what is behind each door, opens Door #3 to reveal a goat. Then he gives you the opportunity to switch your choice to Door #2. The question: Are your chances of winning the car better, worse, or no different if you switch doors?

Monty Hall - Game Show Host, from ABC TV
Monty Hall – Past Host of Let’s Make a Deal.

What is your answer?

To learn the right choice, please read the full article on the Efficient Librarian website. Just know in advance that even the smartest college professors got the logic wrong when they first pondered it!

If you are thinking The Monty Hall Problem is merely a fun little puzzle, know that the ramifications of logic errors in other aspects of our lives are significant. Failing to understand probabilities can lead to poor decisions. As I state in the article:

We face a whole host of probabilistic situations throughout our lives. For example, is it worthwhile to buy extended warranties on appliances? To make an informed decision we have to know the probability that the appliance will fail and the projected cost of an uncovered repair. How about the weather? The accuracy of a five-day forecast is much lower than tomorrow’s forecast. Yet we often treat the two forecasts with the same value. Is it a better investment to buy stock in a single company or purchase a market index fund? The truth is that individual stocks are statistically more volatile than a weighted market index, yet most of business articles focus on finding the next home run stock pick.

If you enjoyed reading about The Monty Hall Problem, then I invite you to explore the follow-up article focusing on the logic behind the game show, Deal or No Deal. In that piece, we learn the important lesson that possibilities are not probabilities!

Enjoy and good luck with your next decision!