How to Get More Done and Waste Less Time
- So, here's a story that I bet
you are intimately familiar with.
I wake up in the morning, I go through my morning routine,
and then I eventually sit down to work.
And right when I sit down, I know what I need to do.
I have a video script I need to finish
and I need to send some feedback to a partner
on a project we're working on.
But then I remember that I also need to send in
the rent check for my apartment,
and I also have 32 un-entered emails in my inbox.
And some of those people are probably getting annoyed
with me at this point,
and oh, the lawn is getting long, as well,
and needs to be mowed.
All the sudden I have 18 different things I need to do
and I really don't know
which one I should be working on first.
Now, if this story does resonate with you
and I bet that it does,
fortunately there is a tool that you can use
to fix this problem.
And it's called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
It's a tool that you could use
to more intelligently prioritize everything you need to do
within a day or within a longer period of time
and that will help you to get started more quickly
on the most important tasks you have to deal with.
Now, as you might have guessed,
this tool is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower,
who, in addition to being the 34th president
of the United States,
was also an extremely productive person.
He served two terms as president and during that time
he introduced both DARPA, which was the agency
that helped to create the modern Internet,
and NASA, which obviously got us to the moon.
In addition, he was the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Forces during World War II,
played a huge part in the development
of the Interstate Highway System,
and was at one point the president of Columbia University.
And the secret behind Eisenhower's incredible ability
to get things done,
in addition to just a massive work ethic,
was his ability to prioritize tasks effectively.
He once said that, "What is important is seldom urgent
"and what is urgent is seldom important."
And this piece of philosophy, this belief that he carried
throughout his life is the foundation
of the Eisenhower matrix.
So, let's briefly talk about how this matrix is set up.
Essentially it is a box with four different quadrants.
And you have some labels at the top and on the sides.
On the top, we have two labels: urgent and not urgent.
And then on the side we've got important and not important.
And each of the boxes corresponds to a combination
of those two labels.
So, things that are urgent and important
are things that you should do right now.
Again, going back to that quote,
things are seldom both important and urgent,
and in the case that they are,
you should just do them right now.
Things that are not urgent, but that are important,
you should decide what to do with them later
or schedule them, essentially.
You still need to do them,
but they don't need to be done right now.
On the flip side, we've got things that are urgent
but not important.
So, they do need to be done fairly soon,
but they're not really important for you.
And in the case of these things,
you should either delegate them, give them to someone else
like your little brother, or automate them.
Give them to the machines.
Finally, we've got things that are not important
and not urgent.
And, as you might expect,
these are things that should just be simply deleted
from your life altogether.
Now, the great thing about the Eisenhower matrix
is that you can use it for both macro-level planning
and micro-level planning, which means that you could use it
for planning out something like your entire month,
but also planning out a single day.
So, what I wanna do now is go through
a couple of different examples
for both macro and micro-level planning.
And let's start with macro.
Let's start with planning out your entire month.
So, if you have your box drawn out
and you've got your list of tasks, maybe in Todoist
or whatever task management system you're using,
you can start to fill in each quadrant
based on your prioritization, based on what's urgent,
based on what's important.
So, in the do box, we might have tasks
like saving your grandma from a burning building.
Probably a big priority for you, but more realistically
maybe it's something like finishing a video script,
in my case.
I need to get this done before I go off to VidCon
so I can give the footage to my editor.
That's both urgent and important.
Now moving over to the decide box,
we've got things like planning out your semester
if you're a student.
Maybe studying for a math test or buying groceries.
These things are all important, or at least I think
they're important and you might think they're important.
But they don't need to be done right now
so you should put them in the decide column
so that way you're prioritizing
the things in the do column first.
That brings us down to the delegate box,
which is a bit of a tricky box for a lot of people
because they often feel
like they can't actually delegate things to other people
or they can't really think of things in their lives
that they would give to someone else.
So, what I'm gonna do is split this box
into two pieces, both delegate and automate should go here
because a lot of people have opportunities to automate
the things that they are doing manually.
Great example here,
if you go into your credit card's website
every single month when you pay your bill,
you can actually automate that.
You can set up automatic payments.
Same thing for maybe investing in your 401K
or investing in a mutual fund if you do that.
And for a much more mundane example,
if you are currently washing your dishes by hand
and you happen to have a dishwasher sitting next to you,
well then let the robot take care of that, as well.
Let it wash your dishes.
But all those automations aside,
there may actually be things
that you could delegate to someone else, as well.
Now as somebody who runs their own business,
I delegate things like checking my email
or editing this video, for example.
But there are other things
that you might be able to delegate.
Maybe you have a lawn that you don't wanna mow.
Well, if you do something where you maybe take the hour
that you were using to mow the lawn to make some extra money
then it would make perfect financial sense
for someone to mow your lawn for you.
And the exact same logic applies
to something like changing the oil in your car.
If it's worth it financially for you to just go and pay
for someone to change your oil,
that saves you a lot of time.
Finally, we have the delete box.
These are the things that are both not important
and not urgent and should, therefore,
just be ruthlessly cut out of your life.
Now there are some obvious examples here.
Maybe checking social media, playing video games,
generally wasting time.
But I do wanna give you a couple examples of things
that I recently cut out of my life
that I had previously justified as important.
One of them is posting on Instagram for business.
I had listened to lots of Internet marketing gurus,
all kinds of people who said this was super important
and I was spending a lot of my time doing it.
But I eventually realized that the payoff I got for it
really wasn't worth my time.
I was much better focusing my efforts and attention
on more important tasks, like making more videos
or working on secret, bigger projects.
So, I've cut that out of my life.
Similarly, on our podcast, The College Info Geek podcast,
we used to have a three-camera setup
and we would constantly switch between camera angles
during the entire course of an episode.
But I realized my editor would have to sit there
for at least the run time of the podcast episode,
often 60 to 90 minutes, or sometimes even more
switching these camera angles.
So, what I asked her to do was just post the podcast episode
using only the center angle, which basically meant
that she only had to spend 15 minutes
kind of just dropping the footage into Premiere,
exporting it, and then she was done
rather than watching through the entire thing.
And interestingly, someone actually commented
saying they liked the center angle more
because they could see the entire view
and see the reactions of the person who wasn't talking.
So, we both cut something out
that took a lot of time in our business,
but also ended up with an improved product as a result.
So, this brings me to a really important point.
When you're prioritizing the things
that you have to do in your life,
you wanna ask yourself, why am I doing each of these things?
Does my justification actually hold up to scrutiny?
In the case of switching the podcast camera angles,
we often use the justification that it was really effortful.
We were putting lots of effort into that production
and that must make it great, right?
But when we actually put that assumption to the test,
we found out that we were wrong
and the simpler approach was actually better.
So, with that being said, let's move on to a micro example.
Let's talk about how you can use the Eisenhower matrix
on a daily basis to prioritize all the things
on your daily task list.
And I'm just gonna run you through mine real quick.
So, in the do column, I have finishing my video script
because again I'm leaving in a couple of days,
I wanna get the footage done as soon as possible
and I wanna get it to my editor.
So, that's the thing that I need to be doing first.
Secondly, in my decide area
I've got things like cleaning up the house.
I've got mailing in the rent check,
and I've got things like guitar practice, as well.
These are all things that I need to get done today,
but they aren't as important as the first thing
that's over in the do box.
Okay, so moving on to that delegate box.
Honestly, today I didn't have anything
that I needed to personally delegate,
but something that does happen on a micro basis,
on a daily basis is that you get requests
from family members.
Maybe your girlfriend or your brother asks you
to do the dishes or clean up a certain room.
And if you've already prioritized all the other tasks
on your list and you realize you don't have time for that,
then a great way to delegate
without actually having to pay anyone money
is to push back on those requests.
Maybe ask them if they can take care of it this time
and you'll get it at a later date.
And finally we have the delete box.
And on a daily basis,
I think that you're gonna wanna list time wasters here
because a lot of us are prone to say,
checking social media, or researching things
that we really don't need to be researching,
like what's the best gaming laptop right now.
We do these things because we don't actually want
to do our work.
And by actually writing them down in that delete box
and maybe keeping your Eisenhower matrix on your desk
or within a quick view, you can look at them
any time you get the temptation
to check Twitter or Instagram
and realize that you have decided in advance
to cut that out of your life.
And that'll help you get to the things
that you need to be doing more easily.
Now if you wanna get even better at structuring your time
and prioritizing your tasks,
then I'm gonna recommend you go and take my friend
Mike Vardy's class
called Productivity Habits That Stick Using Time Theming
which you'll find on Skillshare.
This class teaches you how to effectively split up your work
and theme your days, which will both improve your focus
and increase your output, as well.
And because it's on Skillshare,
once you have your subscription,
you've gone through that course,
you're also gonna have unlimited access
to more than 28,000 other courses
across a ton of different topic areas
that can both improve your creativity and your skills
and your career prospects,
including classes on web development, graphic design,
digital animation, marketing, productivity,
and lots, lots more.
Plus, within their course library,
you're also gonna find a course from me
which is all about building a productivity system.
So, if you wanna improve the way you use your to do list,
your calendar, and your note-taking system,
and all kinds of other bits of technology
to help you be more productive,
you might wanna take that course, too.
Now Skillshare is already an incredibly affordable
loading platform with their monthly subscriptions
being less than a Netflix subscription
and a heck of a lot more useful to your future.
But if you do wanna try it for free first,
all you have to do is go to the link
in the description down below and sign up
to get a two-month free trial with unlimited learning.
Big thanks, as always, goes out to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video
and being a big supporter of my content
and thank you for watching, as well.
Hopefully you found this useful.
Hopefully it helps you to prioritize your tasks
and get more organized.
And if you found it useful,
then definitely hit that like button
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You can also click right there to get a free copy of my book
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since back to school is right around the corner.
Otherwise, click right over here or right over here
to find a couple of more episodes on my channel
if you haven't seen them already.
Thanks as always for watching
and I will see you in the next video.
