Let's look at the Eisenhower Matrix to see how you can improve efficiency and prioritize your activity.
Your goal is to manage your daily activities efficiently to support your company's development.
Prioritize Your Tasks Using the Eisenhower Matrix
Eisenhower famously declared, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
This quote forms the basis for the Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the time management matrix. It uses two criteria to categorize a person's actions and time management: importance and urgency.
Then, you fill in the boxes of the matrix with the tasks to be categorized as follows:
Urgent and important: tasks to be performed as an absolute priority.
Urgent and non-important: tasks that should be immediately delegated to suitable team members. The impact of these tasks is limited.
Non-urgent and important: tasks to be scheduled by setting a deadline. These tasks do have a real impact on you within the company.
Non-urgent – non-important: tasks to be removed or abandoned, as they do not fit in with your goals and appear pointless. At the very least, put these on hold!
The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool for focusing on everything that helps improve productivity. It applies to all areas and allows you to make swift decisions once you have broken down the actions you must carry out.
Organize and Track Your Tasks With Your To-do List
Now that you’ve seen how to prioritize tasks let's look at creating to-do lists.
It should cover all tasks you absolutely must do that day, the ones to be completed ASAP, and those that can be done later (without compromising a deadline).
Successfully Writing a To-do List
Visualize your entire workload.
Focus on priority and urgent tasks.
Meet all-important delivery deadlines.
The Three Key Factors for a Successful To-do List
Use action verbs in your to-do list to stipulate what the task entails: "Reply to the budget validation email."
Alternate between difficult tasks and ones that are faster to do or more motivating.
Be realistic about your daily planning to avoid getting frustrated by only completing half of your to-do list at the end of the day.
Good Managerial Habits
Only list tasks that take less than an hour to complete. Break down each major project into its constituent actions before adding them to your list. This will also help you to stay motivated.
Schedule time slots for the actions in your calendar to avoid unplanned meetings.
Create a done list to have a precise view of everything you have done at the end of the day!
Use Decision-making Tools
In addition to prioritizing and organizing work, another key part of a manager’s role is to make decisions. Here are three decision-making tools for different circumstances.
First, let's look at the decision matrix.
Your goal is to decide on the best solution from various proposals.
The Seven Key Stages in Establishing Your Decision Matrix
Create a table to identify the decision you need to make.
In the columns, list the different solutions analyzed.
Use the rows to list the assessment criteria that the solution must meet.
Define the order of importance of the preceding criteria and add a column with the weighting coefficient.
Complete the table by putting a score from 1 to 10 to indicate how well the solution meets the measured criteria.
Add together all of the scores for each solution's criteria.
Select the best solution (the one with the highest score)!
Example of a decision matrix for choosing commercial services:
Criteria measured | Weighting | Solution 1 | Solution 2 | Solution 3 |
Quality of the offer | 5 | 9 -> 45 | 8 -> 40 | 7 -> 35 |
Scalability | 2 | 7 -> 14 | 8 -> 16 | 5 -> 10 |
Sales support | 1 | 8 -> 8 | 8 -> 8 | 8 -> 8 |
Customer Service | 2 | 8 -> 16 | 9 -> 18 | 9 -> 18 |
Prices | 5 | 7 -> 35 | 6 -> 30 | 10 -> 50 |
Weighted total |
| 118 | 112 | 121 |
The decision matrix facilitates making complex decisions when you must consider several key factors. It has one column for criteria, one for weighting, and one for each solution.
You could use a decision tree for more binary decisions (two options). This allows you to visualize the potential solutions graphically, with branches representing a possible outcome.
Finally, a tool such as the Ecocycle, drawn from the Liberating Structures movement initiated by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, is ideal for strategic decisions.
This system allows you to choose, prioritize, and plan activities.
The name is borrowed from natural lifecycles. Plants, for instance, begin their lives as seeds (incubation). When the ground is fertile enough, shoots will push their way above the surface (birth). The shoots develop into plants that bear fruits or scatter new seeds (maturity). And when the plants die or are composted, they support the birth of new plants (creative destruction).
The same is true of your activities and ideas:
At what stage of the cycle are they?
Are they caught in a poverty trap (insufficient resources to push them forward)?
In the rigidity trap (they take too long and demand too much energy while not creating sufficient value)?
Visualizing your various activities with this matrix will help you understand where resource allocation would be most efficient in driving your ideas and balancing your project's portfolio.
A Few Tips for Better Time Management
Can you estimate how many working hours you spend on the bulk (80 %) of your activities?
No, yet your time is precious!
But don't worry, you can now manage your time because you know how to:
Set goals.
Define priorities based on the Eisenhower Matrix.
Effectively delegate assignments to your team.
Plan your days by following a to-do list.
Make your decision-making more efficient.
Other Good Managerial Habits
Here are two other helpful tips:
Set time limits on your actions and meetings.
Performing one action at a time means you can channel your energy and concentrate on what you are doing. In the case of appointments, let the person know how much time you have available before the meeting.
Perform one task at a time.
Do not scatter your energy across different tasks (e.g., reading emails during a telephone meeting) to save time.
You are at the top of your game when it comes to organizing your team and managing your priorities; well done!
Let's Recap!
Use the Eisenhower Matrix to determine which priority actions you must take, those to be scheduled, and those you should delegate.
Establish a to-do list to help you organize your day's work.
Use a decision matrix to select the best solution.
Assess how much time you spend on each task to optimize productivity.
But it's not over because your team is alive with people leaving, replacements, and new jobs being created. So how are you going to find that rare candidate, the one with the perfect profile to match your team's needs?
