Eisenhower Matrix
I’ve had my share of projects in the past. With each project comes a bit of unknown terrain, deadlines, known tasks, known risks, unknown tasks, unknown risks… the list goes on. It’s hard prioritizing everything as it comes in for a project and backlogging this prioritization becomes a huge burden. I’m sure your project backlog (or your at home to do list) is massive and any attempt to start tackling these things may become overwhelming. Fortunately, I’ve found a rather interesting tool to help: the Eisenhower Matrix!
Your backlog just got easier.
The Eisenhower Matrix was created by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States. During his presidency he launched DARPA (the precursor to the internet) and NASA. He was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forced in Europe during World War 2, and the first Supreme Commander of NATO. This guy was busy! He also had to make a lot of decisions quickly. This box was his tool do accomplish all of these things.
The concept is simple, for a given task, determine if it is urgent or not urgent then determine if it important or not important. Once you figure those out, place the task in the appropriate box. Wherever it lies, you either Do it, Plan it, Delegate it, or Eliminate it.
Consider something on your household to-do list: grocery shopping. It’s urgent if you are out of food, it’s pretty important unless you have some other means of feeding yourself, perhaps a garden or maybe you already have food. If you do have food, it may not be as urgent, but is still important. If you don’t need food right it may not be urgent or important. In either case, you must determine if you need to go now, can plan on going later, can delegate something else to handle your shopping (maybe Amazon pantry?), or if you have a garden that can sustain you, it might not be urgent or important at all and you can completely eliminate it from your to-do list.
Once you completely process your backlog in this manner, you should have (hopefully) eliminated a bit of it. Maybe that deck you want to build can be delegated to a contractor. That room you want organized planned for a day to finally get it done. And that oil change that’s overdue, you’re at the shop today getting it done. This process of backlog grooming can be repeated each week (or however often you want to do it.. be sure to put that task in the right box!) but the process should at least help you see the priority in the items in your backlog and help you groom it to a manageable state. Anything you want to add, make sure you put it in a box!