Hello, welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, I'm the CEO of quality teams and were going to talk about time. Time is essential for product people, because I can tell you, we always have that beautiful constraint. Have a deadline, we all have to meet the clock. So this idea of time management and prioritization is my third part of the essential, the top skills for 2021 for product people.

And as I've said earlier, yes, there are these broad themes of working virtually and critical thinking and learning and resilience. No question, but what I'm doing here in this show is I want to go deep. I want to go specific [00:01:00] in the skills that product people need. So I'm talking about designers, developers, creators, and entrepreneurs.

What do they need in 2021 to be successful? Now we've already talked about growth marketing. We've already talked about this product mindset. So we've got product and marketing, two essential things for innovation. Great off to the races. But the reality is we have so many things competing for our time.

You know, it's funny because it doesn't really matter who I speak to startup people or really senior executives. Everybody is time poor. Everybody is trying to figure out how to reduce workloads, how to manage their time better. And so with this, um, New reality of 2021. And perhaps you're working in a hybrid mode some days at work in the office.

Some days [00:02:00] from home, maybe you're working with more global distributed teams. The days become really big. And so what's really important is to work out what you do now. In fact, a lot of people. Are struggling on, I feel like I've got a very big list and I don't know what actually has to happen right now.

There's too many or. People just try and do everything now. And it's just too much, you know, the human mind is designed to be doing one thing at a time. Science continually validate some proves to us that it's one thing at a time, not two. And we know multitaskers are far less productive and people that are focused and do deep work.

So how do we do that? Well, one of the things that I worked so hard on myself is to prioritize my time and I have found a tool that I want to share with you that I think is super powerful. [00:03:00] This is something I've also been recommending to a lot of people to help them. Make better decisions on where they, uh, how they spend their time, because where we spend our time is what we're saying matters.

And that really ladders up to us reaching our objectives. And, you know, sometimes we put our time in the wrong place. And this is often the reason, this mysterious reason why we kind of, why aren't we on track here? Like I'm working really hard, but it's not quite coming together. It's often because we haven't managed our time and priorities in the right way.

So now, now that we're kind of all in that problem, Headspace let's. Discuss the Eisenhower matrix. This is a great tool, which will provoke you to ask the right questions, but equally to take the right actions. So let me share [00:04:00] this with you and let's get into the world of the Eisenhower matrix. Okay. Now what the Eisenhower matrix does is I want you to imagine you're looking at a quadrant.

In front of you and the top left is a corner. And in that top left, I is the important things and the urgent things. And diametrically opposite. So on the bottom, right. Of the things that you should eliminate, because they're not urgent and not important. These are the two extremes we're working in, things that are really important and urgent and things that are not urgent and not important.

Let's give this some context. So if something is critical, say it's in your OKR, it's in your KPIs. It's your big priority and that makes it an important activity. But if something is urgent and it's the [00:05:00] most it's related to the most important thing you can be doing. The most important goal or objective that you have, this becomes a dual item.

Okay. So we're in the top left of that quadrant. It's important and urgent. You do that now. Okay. Now that one's probably the least surprising of these, but here is where we start to breathe a little easier. What feels really good. Is when you can start to plan and allocate your time. And there is no better thing for that, for that allocation is when something, when an activity that you have on your task is important, but it's not urgent.

Okay. So let's say it could be done today or tomorrow this week or next week. But it is really important. It relates to one of your big objectives or here's the important thing that the Eisenhower matrix does. It [00:06:00] says you need to plan that activity, book it into your calendar. So a good judge of that. If you look at your calendar, how much of your calendar for the next couple of days is actually allocated to important things, because here's the thing.

You can breathe a sigh of relief that you don't have to do it right now. But you can also take some knowingness, some calmness, some wellbeing from the idea that you've allocated time to something that's important in the coming days or weeks. It's not urgent, but you've planned it. So you know that it will be executed if you disrespect your calendar.

So there we go. We've got the first two parts of the Eisenhower matrix. If it's urgent and important do now. If it's important, but it's not urgent plan that activity in your calendar. So open up your calendar and allocate a block of time and label it for [00:07:00] that priority for that task. And there you've done something really good because you're working on important things, but you're doing it now, whether you're planning it for later, this is the essence of something and the magic inside of the Eisenhower matrix.

There's two other parts of the quadrant, which. Do equally good a job, but don't get discussed too much. Now the third part, the third quadrant is where something is super urgent, but for you, it's not really important, but it's in your inbox. And the key thing, the action that you need to do if it's urgent, but it's not important for your goals is to delegate it to the right person.

Who in fact, this is important too. So this third action is the delegation. So we've got doing, we've got planning and we've got delegating. Delegating might mean that there is someone who's far better skilled to do the task, but [00:08:00] also it's very important to their role in the team. So you can delegate it to them.

So we've got, do delegate the fourth one. Is when something is neither important nor urgent. And we need to do only one thing with those things, eliminate them. Don't delegate them, don't plan them. And certainly by no means do them, you eliminate them because it's not important and there's no urgency for it as well.

And you know, the funny thing is so much of managing our time and priorities. Actually happens in these lower areas of delegation and elimination, because we often carry many things that are. Either not important or not urgent for us. And they would be much better delegated or even just eliminated. Just don't do them say no, thank you.

I can't do that. I cannot be part of that. I cannot attend that [00:09:00] meeting, eliminate those things from your time from your calendar and you will feel relieved, but you'll also have more time and more space. To focus on things that are important and urgent because Hey, if you're out there building a product or you're a growth marketer, who's testing the entire funnel, or you're working in a remote virtual hybrid team, you're going to be busy already.

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