In most cases in life, you can either make more of something or be more efficient with how you use something. For example, you can earn more money if you don’t have enough to make you happy or you can be more efficient with how you spend it. You can buy more food if you are hungry or use it more wisely. However, there is one thing that you can’t make more of and that is time. No matter how hard you try or how much you spend, you can’t make more time — you can only try to be more efficient with it.
Over the past few months, my mom has been in and out of the hospital. It became clear after three hospital stays in as many months that she could no longer live independently, so we moved her from her independent living facility to an assisted living facility. Biased towards family obligations of making almost daily runs to the hospital, an hour each way, and helping her move, I have felt a bit out of control when it came to keeping up with my business obligations.
It is funny how when you have some stress in your life, that a solution can sometimes present itself in strange ways. Well, that is how I happened upon a new process of recording my To-Do list that has helped me cope with my recent time pressures.
I have always maintained some type of To-Do list. Typically, I’d scan the list of tasks that need to be done, and find a few tasks that I could accomplish in the time slots I had available. This process worked alright when there was ample time to accomplish all the tasks on my To-Do list each week. Unfortunately, when the list kept getting longer and the time available to address them getting pinched, I’d often wake up in the middle of the night realizing that a critical task was approaching, to which I’d lay in bed and mentally struggle with rearranging priorities losing a lot of sleep.
Once you set up your free account you can create what they call the Priority Matrix on Realtime Board’s cloud platform. I set mine up using my desktop computer. I then saved the URL and pinned it to my bookmark bar folder that appears in the banner of my browser so I can access it with one click from my browser. There is even an app in the App Store and Google Play so you can view and update your Priority Matrix ToDo list from a mobile device.
Once set up I then place my ToDo tasks in the proper location on the Priority Matrix board based on their importance and urgency. Rather than choosing the tasks to perform based on the time I have available, which often caused me to perform shorter and easier tasks over longer and harder ones, I’m focused on accomplishing important tasks that are more urgent in nature first before I tackle any of the other tasks on my list.
Important and Urgent refers to tasks that need to be done and have a critical time element that is drawing near. If ignored, these tasks will cause you pain.
Important and Not-Urgent refers to tasks that need to be done however they can be pushed off so that you can address more urgent ones. Often tasks migrate from important/non-urgent to important/urgent as their due dates approach.
Not-Important and Urgent refers to tasks that have a sense of urgency as a window is closing but if push came to shove, they could be ignored.
Note: Assuming that all the Important and Urgent tasks are completed, you might prioritize what task from either the Important and Not-Urgent and Not-Important and Urgent tasks hold the highest priority.
Not-important and Not-Urgent refers to tasks that may need to be done, but are not part of any critical path nor are they time sensitive in accomplishing.
For example, I may have a task to write up a new blog post like this one. If I have several other blog posts queued up in my content marketing calendar, the task might be considered important but not urgent. However, as the queued post list gets shorter, the task may move to important and urgent. When this happens I simply drag the sticky note from Important but Not Urgent to Important and Urgent in the Priority Matrix. Other tasks such as checking my analytics may be listed as Not Important and Not Urgent at the end of a month, but migrate to Important but Not Urgent at the beginning of the month as I now have another full month’s of data to analyze.
The ability to rate my tasks by their level of importance and urgency has helped me to add a bit more sanity to my life and sleep better, especially when there are a lot of demands for my time.
Can you benefit from using a Priority Matrix To-Do board to organize your tasks?
