iPM #06: The Blueprint for Presidential Productivity

👋 Hey, Kyle here! Welcome to another ✨ free edition ✨ of my weekly newsletter/podcast. Each week I share news and insights on leadership, project management, and continuous improvement. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week 👇

Project Managers and leaders everywhere know that time is the most precious asset there is. We will often negotiate and even fight over food, oil, land, money, and water, but we treat time like it will, well, last forever. In reality, it’s the only non-renewable resource we have.

The theme of this week’s podcast is filed under productivity, specifically focused becoming more effective with your time.

In this issue of the podcast, I want to share a productivity tool that can change the way you view tasks and time. It’s called “The Eisenhower Matrix.” I first learned about this tool at a leadership training seminar hosted by the company I work for. Since then, I’ve been able to accomplish more in less time and gain more control of my desired outcomes.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a task management tool that helps you organize and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, so you can effectively prioritize your most important work. I like to reference it as the blueprint for productivity and can serve as your roadmap to productive action.

This tool helps you divide your tasks into four boxes: the tasks you’ll do first, the tasks you’ll schedule for later, the tasks you’ll delegate, and the tasks you’ll delete.

In order use time in the most effective way and literally 10X your results is to understand the difference between activities which are URGENT and activities which are IMPORTANT.

The 4 categories of activities include:

* Important activities that are urgent (they must be done now or soon)

* Important activities that are not urgent

* Unimportant activities that are urgent

* Unimportant activities that are not urgent

Differentiating between urgent and important within the Eisenhower Matrix can help you identify which tasks you should jump on and which tasks might be better handled by other team members. 

Once you know how to distinguish between urgent and important tasks, you can begin separating your tasks into the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix. 

Remarkable things will begin to happen on your projects and in your life when you start controlling what quadrant you are operating in.

Almost everything is a waste of time. The better you get with your time, the less you tolerate things that are not making an impact on your goals, milestones, values, and priorities.

Most people tolerate spending huge amounts of their time on things that don’t inspire them because they aren’t clear on what they want.

Clarity and inspiration follow productive action.

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