Episode 64: How To Use The Eisenhower Matrix To Prioritise Important and Urgent Tasks in Your Small Business
In this first coaching episode of 2021, Fiona talks about a really important framework that will help you decipher what you should or could be working on this year versus the work that’s not urgent and important at all - using the Eisenhower Matrix. Listen now as she explains how you could use it to apply to your business.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Important vs. Urgent tasks
Eisenhower Matrix
The 4 kinds of tasks
How to use it
Examples
Marketing For Your Small Business
Conclusion
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 64 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
So I am coming at you the day after getting home from a wonderful holiday. I really needed a break. I'm sure every single person listening to this needed a break. And, you know, it's interesting because you get to the end of the year. And I think after the year that 2020 was, a lot of people, myself included, maybe subconsciously had this idea that, you know, the end of the year and we'll be able to kind of shut the door on the pandemic and all the crap that's happening around the world. And we haven't we literally haven't been able to do that. And who knows, you know, 2021, maybe very similar to 2020. I hope it won't be as stressful for people. And I hope that with vaccines and other things, we can, you know, get some sort of control over this pandemic. Who knows?
Maybe that's wishful thinking. Maybe you're somebody who doesn't believe in vaccines, in which case, yeah, we have very different views. But, you know, it takes all folks to run the world. So I welcome anyone and everyone who has a small business to listen to this podcast and hopefully learn from it.
So today's episode is a coaching episode. It's first coaching episode of 2021. And I think it's super, super important what I'm going to go through any time of year, really, but particularly at this time of year, and particularly after going through everything that we've all encountered in 2020.
What I'm going to be sharing in today's coaching episode is a really important framework that will help you decipher, you know, what you should be working on and could be working on this year versus just the nice to have stuff. So let's get stuck in and you can learn about this incredible framework that I found super useful in my own business and with my clients who I've shared it with. All right, let's get started.
So I am into my sixth year now of running my own business, and that is awesome. I'm really impressed, impressed with myself. To be honest. I've never worked anywhere for six years. So, you know, it's awesome. But part of that has led me to just meet and coach and work with just hundreds, hundreds of thousands probably of small business owners now, particularly if I count my people who've gone through my online courses and products and, you know, worked with me at workshops and live speaking gigs, definitely in the thousands.
And what I find quite common amongst all types of small business owners, regardless of where they're from, how many years have been in business, is it this is tendency to focus on what's urgent, so focusing all the time on what's right in front of us, you know, putting out fires, dealing with this particular email, this customer issues just come in. And so we forsake the important for the urgent, which sometimes may, yes, be urgent but isn't always important.
And I know that's kind of a difficult concept to get your mind around. And I know that today's framework will hopefully help you with that. And I think especially as we go into the new year and we're doing all this kind of goal planning and goal setting and all that kind of fun stuff, again, we can do that and then sort of park it because all this urgent stuff pops in and we're like, “oh, my God, that needs to be done and that needs to be done and that needs to be done.” And suddenly it's June and we look back at those goals that we planned out at the start of the year or at the end of last year. And we're like, well, “what happened to all that?” And what we're doing all the time is that we're spending our day to day activity in the urgency instead of always making time for what's most important.
So if you're in this headspace right now or maybe you have a business friend who's in it and you're kind of you've just got off the phone with them and you're like, oh, gosh, how do we get out of being always in this hamster wheel of, you know, urgent, urgent, urgent instead of important or even kind of avoiding what we know will have the greatest impact on our business, then keep listening, because what I'm about to talk about is going to help you with that.
And what I'm going to talk about is a framework, and it's called the Eisenhower Matrix. And that literally helps you figure out amongst all the very many tasks on your to do list what is actually important, what's urgent, what's neither of those things and how to determine which tasks to work on first.
So let's talk about firstly, what is the Eisenhower matrix? You may never have heard of it. You may be completely familiar with it. But either way, let's talk about what it actually is.
So the matrix was devised by Dwight Eisenhower before he became the 34th president of the US. And at the time, he was serving as a general in the army and he was making decisions that were often a matter of life or death. And for most of us, fortunately, the decisions that we're making in our small business are not that extreme. But at its most basic in the Eisenhower matrix is just that it's a simple two by two matrix. So you literally think of kind of four boxes on a page two and then two below them, and it enables you to categorise your tasks into four kind of main areas.
And if you are somebody who is quite visual, very much like myself, and you're kind of listening to this but thinking, oh, I don't really understand what she means, definitely go over to mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/64, because I've got a nifty little PDF that you can download and you can work through the actual matrix itself. And of course we'll link to that in the show notes.
But to go back to these four boxes that you've got, if you can visualise them and the quadrant, so there's one, two and then underneath the three, four.
So the first one is tasks that are important and urgent. Those have to be done first.
Then you've got in the second box tasks that are important but not urgent. And what you want to do is make a plan to do them as soon as you can or kind of schedule those into your calendar.
Number three is not important, but yet urgent. And this is where so many of us fall into the trap of just sort of staying in that quadrant all the time, working on urgent things that are just not that important. Now, you might be like, well, how do I deal with them? What you can do here and what Eisenhower says in The Matrix is to delegate these to somebody else if you can. And in a future episode, I'll be talking about exactly how to hire people.
If you're in my free Facebook group, which is just called the Good Business Group on Facebook, I actually go through a whole video training which is free on how to hire a virtual assistant and a virtual assistant is perfect for these kind of quadrant three important, not important, but urgent tasks.
And then in the fourth quadrant, you've got not important and not urgent. And so you might actually, when you're filling in this kind of quadrant, be like, “whoa, yeah. Why do I even have these things?” And this Eisenhower says, just remove those. Just remove those things from your life, people.
So you think about it again. And it kind of got to an X y axis. And on the Y, I think the Y is the the vertical. I should look that up. But on the vertical one, you've got the important and on the horizontal one you've got urgent.
And so I guess you think about it, the top kind of right hand corner is going to be high importance and high urgency. The bottom will be low of importance and low in urgency. So I hope I'm describing it correctly. It's kind of hard when it's a visual thing. But again, like I said before, if you want the PDF, go to mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/64. But that is a little overview of the Eisenhower matrix.
But you might be thinking, well, why should I use it? And if you're anything like me, no doubt you have things that are really important to you and your business. But somehow these always kind of get shafted because something less important. But that needs your urgent your attention right now has kind of taken up space in your brain and in your calendar.
And if you've listened to this podcast for a while, thank you so much. You might have heard in episode 47, I talked about this little memo board, like a little whiteboard that I use every single day to list out my tasks by priority. And yet, despite that, you know, despite somebody who is very aware of all of this stuff, who uses these frameworks, who coaches people day in, day out, I have all my little productivity techniques. Despite this, I still have days when I let urgent tasks such as replying to random emails from people I don't know who are asking usually for free advice or, you know, coming in for something that's going to benefit them versus my business or I'm checking social media or I'm finding something on YouTube and going down like a YouTube rabbit hole, I will still sometimes let those things overtake the important stuff that I've got to do, such as, you know, in the past working on my book or working on this podcast or exercising or returning a friend's phone call or kind of moving the needle on some launch that we're doing in the business.
And so one way that I've really, really helped me to get through that is to use the Eisenhower matrix before I write these tasks onto my memo board. And I've been able to then be able to finish each day feeling way more productive because of the things that I've done are the things that actually mattered. And they were in that important quadrant on the Eisenhower matrix.
So how do I use it? So I use the Eisenhower matrix - Literally, the first thing that I do is I just do a big brain dump of everything that I need to get done this week or this month or, you know, at this time of year, it might be okay. Let's look at the first 90 days or even let's look at the year as a as a total. And obviously with the pandemic and all sorts of travel restrictions and other things going on, particularly if you're a product-based business that is, you know, producing things offshore, you're not necessarily going to be able to plan out everything perfectly this year. But what you can do is just do a big brain dump, literally just do a big brain mind map – MindMeister is a really good tool for doing mind mapping, or you can just use a good old, you know, pen and paper and just sort of push everything out of your brain onto some sort of documentation, whether it's the iPad, your notes, an iPhone, a pen and paper or whatever, and then go through those things and you could get a highlighter, you could get a highlighter for the four different quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix. You could just use different symbols if you’re kind of a bullet journal kind of person, but get some sort of system to then assess “Is this important?” you know, go through every single thing that you've put on there and think, is this important?
And now everyone has different ideas for this. But some questions that you might want to qualify at this stage are:
Does it impact the three biggest goals or the three main business goals that I have for 2021?
Does it impact my revenue?
Does it impact my wellbeing?
Does it impact my security, including that of my family?
and sort of work through those kinds of questions and think, well, is this stuff that I've put on my brain dump important?
And then the second question to that is, is this urgent?
And I guess the main question that you want to ask here is, “If I don't do this now, will it negatively impact my business?”
And then could it be held off for another day or another week? Now, again, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, thank you so much. Or you're on my Sunday email that I send out every single week, you will know that this podcast was something that I sort of procrastinated on. Definitely it was on my to do list for years, for quite a few years. And I bought, you know, various tools and things to help me with this way back in 2016. But I didn't actually launch it because I had worked through the system and been like, you know what, it's not urgent, but it is important. But also it's not so important that it's prioritising or it's taking a higher priority over other things that I want to do in my business in past years.
Now, it's got to a stage with this podcast is really important. It's one of my key marketing channels. It's doing incredibly well in terms of reach and in terms of engagement and people coming, you know, coming to me for work or to, you know, go speaking gigs and all that kind of stuff. So it's definitely now in the important and probably urgent. And also I've got certain things that have to be done each week.
So my Sunday email has to go out. I have two episodes of the podcast week that have to go out. And so there definitely are things that we do in the marketing for My Daily Business Coach that are urgent and important. And so they are prioritised. So when you're looking through kind of how to use this, like I said, the first thing, just do a big brain dump of everything that you kind of want to get done either this week, this quarter, this month, this year, if you're like, yeah, that's going to go big and then ask yourself those questions. One is it important? And is this urgent?
Once you have asked those questions and the way they used to highlight or you've used your kind of symbols or something else to kind of nut out your brain dump and put it in some sort of structure, you'll then be able to figure out, I guess, where in the Eisenhower matrix these tasks or these ideas sit.
So again, to go through how this works, if it's in quadrant one, if you've marked this is important and urgent, then you want to prioritise those and you want to make sure that you're completing those first. And so what that might look is that you're pushing back other stuff to make way for these or you're, you know, shortening certain meetings so that he can get this other stuff done or you are delegating other tasks to get these things done. You need to make sure that the stuff that's in quadrant one is being prioritised and you're scheduling it in and they've got a deadline for that.
If it's in quadrant two, so that's important, but not urgent. You want to then plan out when you'll do this and add to your calendar so it gets done. So quite a few of the clients that I work with, you know, they've got big teams they're leading. They are not necessarily big, but, you know, they might have five staff or up to 10 staff or, you know, two or three staff. And so they've got a lot of stuff that they've got to do with the staff during the day, during business hours. And so but they want to keep their own learning happening. And so we prioritise. That's important. That learning is important, but it's not urgent. They're not going through university. There's not like tertiary things that have to be completed by a certain date. And some of them may have bought courses that are like self-paced courses that they can go through with their own time. But that's still important. You definitely do not want to be one of those people. I think it's like 80 percent of people who buy courses will never complete them, which is just a horrible statistic. Come on, people, if you buy a course, set some time aside to complete it. And that's exactly an example of things being in quadrant two. Important, but not urgent. So if you have bought a course ever in your business and you're like, I've paid this money I invested, I wanted to learn that skill that, you know, whatever it is that you've bought, make sure you schedule the time to complete that. You might not need to do it this week because it's not urgent. Remember, it's important but not urgent, but it is important. So for me, I try and take Wednesday evenings. That's my learning time. And of course, I'm always learning otherwise as well. I also have an hour on Mondays to do that.
But yeah, you want to look at those things and plan out when you'll do the items in quadrant two that is important but not urgent and add it into your calendar. So this stuff actually gets done.
If it's in quadrant three, so this is not important but urgent. Consider how you might delegate this and you could delegate that, like I said before, to a virtual assistant, to somebody in the admin team, to an intern, perhaps it's to a consultant or it's finding a tool that helps you.
So I use Xero, which is an online software for accounting that really, really helps, you know, streamline my finances, makes me able to look at things, you know, within seconds to be able to see where I'm at, profit loss statements, activity statements, all of that kind of stuff. It could also be a tool that coach schedule, which helps you amplify and organise content, particularly if you have multiple people feeding into a blog or your social media. So that's quadrant three. Not important, but urgent.
So if it's not important, but it's urgent, can somebody else do this or can it be automated? Can at all help you do this?
And then if it's important for not important and not urgent, just get rid of it. Ask yourself, why are we doing this and just get rid of it altogether?
So this could be things like particularly maybe you're using a particular social media that, you know, has zilch cut through for your audience. It has never giving you a single sale. It doesn't give you a good brand awareness.
You don't feel that your audience is on there, you know, just get rid of it altogether or if there's something else that you're doing and you just feel like it's a slog, it never actually seems to bear any fruit for your business. Really. Consider if you have to be doing it and maybe move it to quadrant three, get somebody else to do it, automate it, see if it gets any better. But if it's in quadrant four it's not important and it's not urgent, really, really question do you need to do this at all?
Now, just a word of warning. You know, I love and I use this framework. I love it and I use it. But not everything in your life or your business can easily be categorised into important or urgent or important and urgent. You know, some things. And I'm going to, you know, out myself, you. But I have added myself here like I watch trash TV. That is definitely something I do. I love my reality trash. I'm all for it. I just think it's a great escape. I'm actually in 2021, one of my big goals is health and not just, you know, exercising, losing weight, all that stuff, eating better, but health in all parts of my life. So I'm actually really looking at my trash TV and thinking, do I need to watch this? Maybe I could, you know, better spend my time. But my point here is that there will be some things, whether it's watching trash TV, whether it's watching beautiful documentaries, making, you know, new secret boards on Pinterest for your home renovations or rereading, you know, old self-help books or rereading your favourite business books like Passion, Purpose, Profit, Shameless Plug.
But some of those things may be neither important nor urgent, but these are simple things that, you know, might make you feel good, and so they still get factored into your life. So I'm not saying every single thing in your life needs to fit perfectly in the Eisenhower matrix, but when it comes to business, definitely give it a go.
And I get also that, you know, January can be a tough month for small business owners, particularly if many of you in the retail sector, many of you who are in the restaurant sector or hospitality, who have been really massively hit with covid. And I know that you might be like, here's another thing I have to do, but I really hope that this actually helps you go through your to do list and not feel so overwhelmed and actually kind of have some structure to it.
So if that is, if you're somebody who tends to write these lists but then things don't get done or you tend to do this goal planning or goal setting, but not go getting, then take a look at the Eisenhower matrix. And it might just be a really good framework that you can employ in your business, maybe get your staff involved, maybe do it, you know, a strategy session and work through things so that you can make 2021 a really good, solid year and you don't get to the end of it feeling like, “Well, I did a whole lot, but I certainly didn't have time off.” But I don't feel like we had a great impact with the things that we did on that business goals.
So as I mentioned before, the show notes, including a PDF that you can download of the Eisenhower Matrix, will be available at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/64 as this is episode 64.
Now, before I go, I wanted to let you know that I am actually opening up an eight week online live coaching program to coincide with my Marketing For Your Small Business Online course. Now, I've taught this for years and you can find out more at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com to join the waitlist, literally go to the show notes from today, which are at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/64 and you can join the wait list. So the course is available. You can buy that any time and work through it yourself. And many, many people have done that and are doing that.
What I'm introducing is an eight week program as part of this. So every single week for eight weeks I will be live coaching, working through the eight key modules of the marketing for your small business course.
So you'll not only understand, you know, how to put together your plan, but you'll really understand the strategy that goes into a solid marketing schedule, solid marketing project. You'll be able to understand how do your campaigns fit in with your business goals? And you'll really get over that scattergun marketing approach that I see so many small business owners do. So if you are wanting to really excel in your marketing in 2021 and beyond and you want some guidance to be able to do that, then definitely check out the upcoming eight week online program as part of the marketing for your small business course. And again, you can find that at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. You can find it in the show notes for today's podcast. So that is it for today's podcast and coaching episode. I really hope you've enjoyed this one. If you have, I would love it if you have five seconds to spare to leave a review. I probably takes actually less than five seconds and that just helps this podcast get found by other small business owners like yourself.
Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
