When you’re in a startup or large enterprise, what you will learn quickly is how people make decisions. The longer your experience in the company, the faster you are in actually making decisions. But how do you train new team leads or members and get them through the weeds and chaos of everyday work. In this post, I want to go through one of my go to tools for deciding priorities of my day to day and how I get my team to use it as well.
When COVID and remote work started back in 2020, I found myself trapped with non-stop meetings. Soon after I have to lead a team, interact with customers, debug issues, do code reviews, do one-on-one … all in a day’s work. I soon realize that I cannot ponder every decision I have to make for hours or days, I probably have only minutes, before making the next decisions. Over time, I realized that I have to train new team leads and without a guide, things get chaotic really quickly. So I started my learning how to improve my decision making tools and make it teachable to others.
Eisenhower Matrix
During my research, I came across the Eisenhower Matrix, named after the US President known for his role in World War II and how his experience during the war and presidency taught him the distinction between urgency and importance of anything you are doing. When faced across challenges of too many things on your todo list, how do you start tackling them in a meaningful way, especially when you have a team of your own. The matrix helps decides how and when to tackle tasks in your todo list.
Importance and Urgency
The two metrics that you have to realize are generally importance of a task in terms of personal, organization or corporate goals and urgency, which how soon the task is expected to be completed or addressed. Many tasks claim to be important, but only to the ones asking for it, not to the person working on it. So it is actually very important what is personal or organizational goal or KPI, and gauge whether or not the task is getting you closer or further away from those goals. Similar to urgency, understand the timeline in which aligns with your actual ability and capacity.
Process
There are many templates out there for the matrix, but this is generally sectioned into four blocks
Importance:
Urgency:
From here you categorized it into four categories:
Important and Urgent
- You should do them immediately, why wait?
Important and Not Urgent
- You should put it into calendar so you don’t forget about it, ie schedule them!
Not Important and Urgent
- You should delegate to someone else, this should have been doable by someone else!
Not Important and Not Urgent
- Eliminate them - this is distractions and unnecessary
By using this particular method, decision making becomes easier for me to do, and it’s clear that you will need to understand that not everything is important and urgent; understanding that makes it easier to plan your day or week even in the face of uncertainty.
