Welcome to Design Your Life x5!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different idea that helps you to design your life (e. g. productivity, goal setting, time management, mindfulness, tools, frameworks, etc.) in 5 main points.

Designing your life means holistically reflecting on and understanding your past, organizing and focussing on your present and shaping your future.

📈 The Eisenhower Method

🗒️ #1 What is it?

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

The Eisenhower Method is based on this statement and allows you to prioritize and categorize your tasks into a matrix based on the two dimensions importance (important / not important) and urgency (urgent / not urgent).

Therefore, the matrix overall has 4 quadrants:

• 1. Important & Urgent

• 2. Important & Not urgent

• 3. Not important & Urgent

• 4. Not important & Not urgent

Importance is about how large the impact of this task is (e. g. for yourself, for another person, for your goal, ...).

Urgency is about by when we need this task to be completed (e. g. if it has a concrete deadline).

✔️ #2 How to use it?

• Prepare the matrix (e. g. on a paper, whiteboard or digital in any app). You should be able to categorize your tasks.

• List down the tasks you want to prioritize.

• For each task, think about how important and how urgent it is. If it helps you, you can use a scale to evaluate these dimensions (e. g. 1-5).

• Assign the corresponding priority to each task and fill it in the corresponding quadrant.

• Work on the tasks based on these rules:

  • 1. Important & Urgent: These tasks have the highest priority, you should do them as soon as possible.

  • 2. Important & Not urgent: Because these tasks are important but not urgent yet, you should terminate to make sure that they are done before "it's too late".

  • 3. Not important & Urgent: In a business context, these tasks should be delegated. If it's only you, of course, you can't delegate them. If the urgency is crushing, you should do them right after the tasks put in 1.

  • 4. Not important & Not urgent: "Officially" according to the method it's recommended to delete these tasks. However, you can still keep them in a backlog if you like. But they should definitely not be your focus for now.

🤔 #3 Why does it help to design your life?

Organize your present: It helps you to work and put your focus on the right things because you have prioritized your tasks accordingly.

Shape your future: It helps you become clearer in finding out what is really making an impact for your future.

👍 #4 Pros & Cons

• ➕ It's a very easy method, you don't need any special knowledge or tools.

• ➕ It allows us to work on the right tasks.

• ➕ The visualization in a matrix can be helpful make the prioritization even clearer.

• ➖ The "delegate" recommendation doesn't work if these tasks depend upon yourself.

• ➖ The strict order contradicts following the personal flow of energy and creativity.

• ➖ Visualization can become messy when there are too many tasks.

💡 #5 Tips

• To better evaluate the importance and urgency of a task, you can use a scale (e. g. 1-5).

• Remember that this method is purely about finding out to work on the right tasks (effectivity), not to work on the tasks right (efficiency).

• Use this as a guide, but don't neglect your personal motivation, the flow of energy and creativity.

• In the beginning, as soon as you have evaluated one task as a base, you can then evaluate the following tasks in comparison to this base task. It will simplify the evaluation a lot.

• You can also use this method to evaluate other concepts, such as projects or goals.

• Be clear about the context and keep it consistent. What does important mean (e. g. progress on your personal goals, or the impact in general, etc.)? What does urgent mean (e. g. today, this week, this month, etc.)?

• We often spend our time on urgent tasks. But very often, the real tasks for your personal are important, but not urgent. To reach your goals, you often need to do the important things today, that are not urgent yet.