Weekly Training Booster Episode #8: The Urgent and Important Matrix

Join Andy Palmer and Darren A. Smith in the eighth episode of the Weekly Training Booster. This episode was about understanding the urgent and important matrix. Also known as the Eisenhower matrix. A tool for helping you to understand how to improve your time management.

You Can Read the Urgent and Important Matrix Episode Transcript Below:

Andy Palmer:

Welcome to week number eight of our MBM weekly training booster. Good afternoon, for those that are watching it live, and hello to anyone else. It's a hot Friday afternoon here for us. Today, Darren, we are going to talk about the Urgent versus Important Matrix of helping to support a time management system, sometimes called the Eisenhower model. So I'm going to ask you to give us a brief overview and then we'll get in and explore it further.

Darren A. Smith:

Cool. This is a cracking tool, the Urgent versus Important, or Important versus Urgent Boston Matrix. So imagine a Boston Matrix. I'm going to flash one up, but I don't think everyone will be able to see that quickly. And what it says is, there's two axis. Urgent, and there's another axis of important. And once you cross check those and you get your four windows, you end up with what you can do and how you can think about time management, and whether a task is urgent, or whether it's important and how it overlaps with each other.

Andy Palmer:

That makes great sense. And I keep referring to situational base needs. Whenever I'm doing training of late, whether it's people management, situational leadership, or whether it's category management and talking about situational category management, adapting to the situation. And I think this is just another good example of, based on a situation that you've got and your situation be dictated by urgent and important allows, and that then, of course, dictates the options that you've got. So from what you've just said about those four quadrants, what sits within those four quadrants? How would you bring that to life?

Darren A. Smith:

So let's roll through. The reasons it's called the Eisenhower Matrix, is supposedly, President Eisenhower came up with it. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter. So you can either call U and I Matrix, or the Eisenhower Matrix, or the Urgent and Important Matrix. If we take that Matrix, and we say something is neither urgent, so we look at this axis, or important, then it's right down here. So we've got a time demand or a task that's neither urgent or important. Now this is the crazy space you get into. You say, "Well, if it's not urgent and it's not important, what should I do with it?" What do you think?

Andy Palmer:

What should you do with it? Well, it's actually probably not do anything with it, but again, you don't need it slipping through your system. So I'm going to hazard a guess that some sort of reminder, some sort of park it somewhere, put a date on it, come back to it. That type of [crosstalk 00:02:32].

Darren A. Smith:

It could be that. I mean, if it's not urgent and it's not important, you probably shouldn't do it now. Now if you get some JFBI's in your business, we all know what that acronym stands for. And sometimes, you've just got to get these things done. "That's okay. The boss wants it, the customer wants it. I'll just get it done. Fine. Not particularly urgent, it's not important, but over the next couple of weeks." So what we ought to do with this, is try and do as few of these as possible, because you can imagine, if you and I are operating in a space where it's neither urgent or important, what the hell are we doing? We can't be being productive.

Andy Palmer:

Yeah. Absolutely. All right. That makes sense. So we can either dismiss that, get rid of it. If then we were to dial up one of those axis, and let's say, something becomes more important, what does that look like?

Darren A. Smith:

Yeah. All right.