- Published on
The Eisenhower Matrix, Productivity Anxiety, and Values
- Authors
- Name
- Sean Alexander Harris
- @SeanHAlexander
"Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and
short term! Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are
almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather
than to the important future."
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1961 address to the Century Association,
Key Terms
- Important: impacting an outcome that leads to us achieving our goals (whatever the context).
- Urgent: demanding immediate attention, more often than not actually involve achieving someone else’s goals or mitigating an unforeseen circumstance.
I get very fixated on staying on top of life admin: ticking through the neverending series of tasks you have to complete to manage the mundane things in life as well as the less mundane but nonetheless time consuming ones. You have to juggle doing home upkeep, finances, social engagements, community responsibities. The list goes on ... In my head, I lump these things together as a kind of 'life productivity' and feel bad if I haven't made a dent in being top of them. My problem is that different tasks have different impacts on how stressed or not I feel and vary significantly in terms of priority. An old colleague Phoebe once suggested using the Eisenhower Matrix as a way of visualising and prioritsing tasks.
In brief, the Eisenhower method involves categorising tasks as either imporant or unimportant, and either urgent or non-urgent. This forms the basis for a 2 x 2 matrix that allows you to understand the priority landscape of your tasks and to prioritise and manage them accordingly.
I found a Notion template that had set up the logic for visualising tasks according to this framework so I set to it. In short, within a month I'd found that by being able to recognise which tasks were both important and urgent (and nailing them first) I was able to drastically decrease my background level of life admin anxiety.
However, I noticed that sometimes some tasks would be neither important nor urgent but nonetheless be a stressor for me. I don't want to do too much armchair pyschologising here but it has been enough to recognise these irrationally stressful tasks and mark them as such. They don't supercede the importance/urgency dynamic in my task management but I can see them so if I have a spare bit of time that fits nicely with completing them, I can do so easily without having to quiet my mind to remember and recognise which tasks are the source of irrational stress.
Not long afterwards, my colleague Faye, a Delivery Consultant here at Armakuni, gave a great internal talk about reflecting on and recognising your values. I'd done a similar exercise about ten years ago as I finished university and began teacher training. I wish I still had the notes I'd made in that values session but the only one I firmly remember was 'health'. Faye had us think and choose 10 values that we felt were most important to us, then filter those down to 6 and 3 in subsequent steps in order to perhaps recognise what our core values were and how their interpretation in our lives was unique to us.
I was checking in on my Notion Eisenhower later and it occurred that it would be interesting to see how much of my amorphous blob of 'life admin' somehow actually linked to the values I'd noted down in Faye's session. As a result, I added a column and tagged my tasks with values that seemed to relate (if any). The results were interesting as generally the more important tasks do have links to more values. I can already sense holes in the pattern finding I'm doing here and suspect behavioural heuristics at work. But the ability to sense some (admittedly slight) value in my life admin tasks does slightly reduce the sigh factor when I'm trying to stay on top of them.
A recent snapshot of the result:
N.b. I had a thought about how some values are ideals rather than emotions and there are likely other dimensions to read into - that's a topic for another blog after some deeper reading. My thought was that you can value and feel 'love' or 'friendship' but you can't or don't feel 'democracy' or 'democratic' in quite the same way.
Further Reading: