Balancing the urgent and the important

In any kind of leadership or management role, you can find yourself bombarded with lots of requests. And it seems every one of them is someone's top priority.

It's impossible to respond to every request right away; that's a sure way to lose your own time, by answering every request that comes to you. Instead, leaders need to find a way to navigate these requests effectively.

The Eisenhower Matrix (coined by Steven Covey, but taking inspiration from Eisenhower) helps to prioritize by identifying "Urgent" and "Important" tasks. These sound like they are the same thing, but they are not: "Urgent" tasks require your immediate attention, "Important" items need to be done to support long term goals.

Consider how to respond to different requests by organizing these kinds of requests in a matrix: let's put "Urgent" on the x axis, and "Important" on the y axis. Some people prefer to organize this in a 3x3 grid, where each axis has "low," "medium," and "high." But I like to think in quadrants, so I only use "high" and "low."

The upper right quadrant shows tasks that are both important and urgent. These items may have consequences if they are not done, so they need to get done right away.

The lower left quadrant shows tasks that are neither important nor urgent. These items offer little to no value, and are basically distractions. Consider dropping these tasks.

The other two quadrants show tasks that are "important but not urgent" and "urgent but not important." These have medium priority. Consider scheduling the items that are important but not urgent; these can wait, but need to get done. Reassign or delegate tasks that are urgent but not important; these are time sensitive items but should not require executive review.