Zig Ziglar once said that ‘Lack of direction and not lack of time, is the problem. We all get the same twenty-four-hour days.’

If you ever find yourself in overwhelm focus is the key.

The things we do throughout the day are generally divided into urgent and important. Tasks are either urgent or not urgent, important or not important, and each and everyone one of us will allocate a different task to each quadrant in our own unique way.

We like to use a simple four box system with our clients…

Box 1 Urgent & Important… these are the tasks you need to prioritise. You need to get them done today or tomorrow, these tasks could be customer focused, and they have a clear deadline.

Box 2 Important but not urgent – these are tasks that are really important and you need to allocate some quality time too there is a deadline but it’s not today or tomorrow… this could be credit control or training. The challenge is that one day they will become urgent and end up in box 1.

Box 3  Urgent but not important – these may be urgent for someone else but not important to you, they may be small things you can quickly get done and out of the way or allocate small bites of time at the end of the day. This is the have you got a minute boss box.

​Box 4 Not important not urgent, otherwise known as the procrastination box, this should be empty! If you find yourself doing tasks in this box ask yourself why? Re-visit your original to do list, is this something that should have been ditched then this is the area where we go to escape when the pressures on.

This is a really fabulous tool and if it changed the life of a President (Eisenhower) in terms of prioritising and planning. It can certainly change your life for the better and you’ll be so much more productive.

Take a look at your to do list and allocate the tasks you have planned to do to a box on the matrix. Where are you planning to spend your day doing urgent stuff or important stuff?

It’s also worth doing a retrospective evaluation of what actually happened in your day and where did that fit in the matrix.

 If you would like a tool to help you with this drop me an email [email protected] and I’ll get it over to you.