Category: Efficiency & Productivity

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.

Balancing Quiet Time Versus Go Time

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It seems like our world is perpetually urging us to go faster and faster. The pressure to accomplish more today than the day before can be intoxicating. However, is it sustainable?

Recently on his website, Darius Foroux explored this problem. In a post called Balancing Quiet Focus Time with Go Time, he explores the delicate balance between speeding ahead to our objectives versus slowing down to take a breath. He starts by exploring the fallacy of being constantly in motion.

Most ambitious people have this false belief that they should always be in go time.

They want to be fit, social, have a good romantic relationship, spend time on their hobbies, see their friends, learn new skills, travel, and do well at work.

When I list all of this, it sounds ridiculous. How can one person push hard in every area of life, every single day?

You can’t.

Foroux goes on to define the two modes of time and how they interact. This is important to understand how to balance them out.

Go time is when you push. You execute ideas, meet people, travel, train hard, learn new skills, take on projects, and move things forward. Your energy goes outward.

Quiet focus time is when you slow down and narrow your attention. You read, think, write, plan, recover, or work on one important thing without trying to do ten other things at the same time.

You need both modes. And the balance between them keeps changing.

The trap that Foroux calls out is the misunderstanding that our energy levels can be kept in a constant high state. The truth is that they change all the time. Pretending otherwise can lead to long term problems.

I understand the urge. If you can force yourself to feel energetic, you can keep doing everything on your list.

But I don’t think that’s a good long-term strategy. You can override tiredness for a while, but eventually you pay for it. I don’t want to use up my body just so I can feel productive every day.

To learn more about how Foroux recommends balancing between quiet time and go time, I invite you to read the rest of his post.

Speeding Up by Slowing Down

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Are all productivity techniques designed to speed up your daily work?

Most people who engage with approaches like Getting Things Done want to complete more items in less time. Whether it is whipping through emails, checking off to-do lists, or flying through meetings, the desire work at a rapid pace is enticing. However, is moving faster actually the path to long term success?

GTD creator David Allen mused on the subject in a recent post on the Getting Things Done website. He opens with this statement:

I want to talk about one of the more mysterious best practices in the GTD® methodology: the art of speeding up by slowing down.

I am making the assumption that all of you reading this are on some track of improvement and growth to begin with. I mean, why speed up, instead of slow down, as an end-result?

As Allen unpacks his argument, he shows that the idea of speed as the path to productivity ultimately proves self-defeating. The problem he sees is repeatedly doing many things of little value jeopardizes long term success.

One of the subtlest ways that positive energy retreats from us is in our busy-ness. Losing perspective in trying to control everything, finish it all, fix it all—all at once. It shows up in ways like practicing Getting Things Done® out of frustration instead of inspiration, or helping yourself and others out of compulsion, not compassion.

For those who have not practiced GTD, Allen’s counter-intuitive conclusion may seem confusing. Yet, when considered more fully, the practice is not about getting everything done. Instead, it is knowing what is truly valuable and giving that priority. This approached alleviates the stress of busy-ness and induces a state of calmness. Allen states:

As a matter of fact, your ability to do nothing—to be idle, to daydream, to nap peacefully, to give yourself permission for 100% zoning out—is a hallmark of GTD maturity. And if you don’t believe me, just read the plethora of new data from the cognitive scientists about the need for the brain to rest—daily. That’s a bit tough to do, though, unless you’re REALLY onto the GTD game.

To understand better how slowing down will help you get important things done, feel free to read the full blog post on the Getting Things Done website.

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.

Doing More & Avoiding Burnout

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Have you ever heard a manager say that we need to do more with less?

Many workplaces lack the luxury of abundant staff and large budgets. These are work environments where everyone pitches in on multiple fronts. Often this means people work longer hours, sacrificing evenings and weekends away from their families to get the work done. While this might be needed for significant deadlines, that level of pace is unsustainable. It quickly leads to burnout. Therefore, is there a way to avoid the overwork trap and still reach the organization’s goals?

Recently, consultant Irina Bilenko shared her thoughts on LinkedIn in an article titled, Doing More With Less Without Burning Out Your Team. She regularly talks with nonprofits struggling to get things done and at the risk of wearing themselves out. Her initial observation on the problem is a simple one.

The phrase “do more with less” is often repeated in the nonprofit sector. But I think it’s misleading. If people are already working at full capacity, asking them to simply do more isn’t a sustainable answer.

The answer is not working harder. The answer is making it easier to focus on what matters most.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

Ramming through with grit and putting in extra hours is actually highly inefficient and wasteful. Instead, Irina believes that stepping back to examine the organization’s workflow leads to better productivity in the long run.

What I discovered was that the problem wasn’t effort. The problem was the system.

Work was held up by unnecessary approvals. Decisions took too long. Information wasn’t available when people needed it. Teams were solving the same problems over and over. Meetings filled calendars without producing decisions.

When those barriers were removed, something interesting happened.

People didn’t need to work harder. They suddenly had more capacity.

Irina found that improving the system starts with removing unnecessary items. Eliminating low value tasks and pointless meetings relieved tension and led to more success on the individual and organizational levels. For example, getting rid of producing pointless reports and streamlining levels of approval saved hours of time. This in turn allowed employees to enjoy their evenings and weekends, confident in the knowledge that they were accomplishing their goals.

To learn more from Irina on how improving systems can generate better results, I invite you to read the rest of her 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.

Meetings – A Healthy Conflict Space

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What’s worse than a boring meeting?

Imagine a conference room where those gathered, despite the best of intentions, are launching metaphoric war against each other. The participants spend their time engaging in personal attacks against their colleagues and any idea dared presented is destroyed in the crossfire. In the end, all that anyone takes away from the meeting are lasting scars.

Managing healthy conflict in a meeting is vital to the success of any organization. After all, one of the main reasons to hold a meeting is to robustly discuss ideas. However, without ground rules for engagement, meetings can become adverse spaces where no one wants to tread. Therefore, are their ways to manage conflict in meetings to get positive results and enthusiastic engagement?

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.com

I’m excited to share that I wrote a chapter for a new book on library management publishing this fall. It is titled, Librarianship Beyond the Textbook: A Practical Guide for Real-World Challenges. In my chapter on running effective meetings, I share several ways to enable healthy discussion when everyone is gathered around the conference table. Here are a few suggestions to consider right now.

  • Set Ground Rules: Establish norms for respectful communication and ensure everyone understands that differing opinions are welcome. No one will be judged or criticized on their contributions.
  • Encourage Diverse Perspectives: Actively invite input from all participants by emphasizing that differing viewpoints are valuable for the discussion.
  • Focus on the Issue, Not the Person: Encourage team members to address ideas rather than personal attributes of the other participants. This helps keep discussions constructive.
  • Use “Yes, and…”: This technique from improvisation encourages building on each other’s ideas by tossing out the word “no.” The invitation in the “and” fosters collaboration.

In my chapter, I share many tips and strategies for successful meetings, including defining the purpose, selecting the participants, setting agendas, and ensuring next actions are assigned.

To read more about this topic and get great management tips from the other contributing library leaders, be sure to order your copy of Librarianship Beyond the Textbook: A Practical Guide for Real-World Challenges.

Is It Worth Doing a Weekly Review?

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When was the last time you took a full inventory of all your open projects, next actions, calendar appointments, and waiting for items?

The GTD Weekly Review is an important way to keep on top of your work. In fact, GTD Founder David Allen considers it a “critical success factor” for achieving your objectives. For those not familiar with the practice, the weekly review is done at the end of a work week and consists of going through all your action folders, tracking projects, and otherwise keeping your workflow and space clean.

However, not everyone sees the value in committing to a weekly review. Some believe that the energy put into a weekly review is best spent actually doing meaningful work on projects. Is that true?

In a recent post, David Allen lays out the argument that the time spent in a weekly review is time well spent.

I asked if it was worthwhile doing the review, and he admitted that it was critical to stay on top; but that it was “work” to keep it up. It didn’t seem to be saving him time.

The truth is, it probably won’t save you more time–well, it will, but you will need that extra time to do the reviews and keep lists and categories of items current. Yes, you can get better and faster at how you do it. But it requires investment, no matter how good you are at it. As a matter of fact, the less you have time to do it, the more time you usually need to spend with it! 

For David Allen, no matter what system is used to keep track of work, without regular maintenance it will fall apart, forcing its user to try and keep track of everything in their head.

That’s why it becomes critical, once these are somehow objectified into an external system, that they be put in front of our conscious thinking process at least once a week, to get it all recalibrated to match our reality. And I guarantee that there are some intuitive “aha’s” and “I could’s” and “I ought to’s” lying dormant, only to be triggered by putting reminders and triggers about all the aspects of our life and work in front of our face on a regular basis. That could be daily, weekly, monthly, depending on the complexity of your life at the moment.

To learn more about the importance of the weekly review, please read the rest of his post.