Priorities, Decisions, and the Eisenhower Matrix

[00:00:00] You may have heard the quote, show me your calendar. I'll tell you your priorities, or maybe this version. Don't tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are. If you've been around my channel much, you might've even heard my favorite saying, if it's important, you'll find time.

If not, you'll find an excuse. Your priorities in your life will dictate your choices. But how do we organize our priorities? Do you know what your priorities are? Do you intentionally let them guide you or do they guide you from the shadows and you don't even think about it? In today's show, we'll talk about one option for clarifying your priorities as well as your schedule to help you with the decisions you face every day.

Grab a cup of coffee. Let's get into it.

Here's the million dollar question. How do men like us reach our full potential? Growing to the men we dream of being while taking care of our [00:01:00] responsibilities. working, being good husbands, fathers, and still take care of ourselves. Well, that's the big question in this podcast. We'll help you answer those questions and more.

My name is Brent and welcome to the Fallible Man podcast.

Recently, I had to make some choices in my life that were very difficult to make. There's a lot riding on those choices and there was a lot. To it. I mean, it wasn't cut and dry, clear, simple. That would have been nice, but most things in life really aren't that clear. There's a great deal of stress and worry about the impacts of those choices.

And there's a lot of risk and a lot of things to consider. And it was just really, really frustrating and hard. When faced with a situation like this, the only thing you can really do is go back to what your actual priorities are. And from that information, you can start making better choices. [00:02:00] While this doesn't make it easy and it will not negate the risk involved, it will tell you which risks are actually worth it to you.

By the to the Fallible Man Podcast, your home for all things man. Big shout out to Fallible Nation. That's our private community. You can find more about that in the show notes or the description. A warm welcome to our first time listeners. Hey, we know there is a lot competing for your attention, so we appreciate you checking out the show.

I hope you enjoy it. Let us know in the comments, and I hope you get something great out of this show. So, what is a priority? I mean, let's be clear, right? So we'll go to the dic d d d d d We'll go to the dictionary, because that clears things up most of the time, right? Not so much. Sorry, sarcasm's not my strong suit.

But the first definition is precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency. So that's what we're going to work off of in this show. Now, regardless of if you actually believe any of the aforementioned sayings we made at the [00:03:00] beginning of the show, knowing what your priorities are in life gives you a major advantage and will help you steer your choices to achieve what's truly important to you.

But not everybody is really clear on what their life priorities are. They're not really cure on clear here. Sorry. I was just reading the children's book for my other show. They're not really clear on what, what drives them. And that's, that's something that's hard to flesh out for some people. And that's fine.

So today I want to share with you a decision making paradigm that you could try out, help flesh out your priorities as you're going through your decisions you have to make. Now, this paradigm can be applied to any number of situations professionally, personally, all kinds of things. So it's actually a pretty solid paradigm for decision making anyways in your life, and you may never have heard it before.

So it's called the Eisenhower matrix and it's a productivity prioritization and time management framework [00:04:00] designed to help you prioritize a list of tasks and agenda items by first characterizing those items according to their Urgency and importance. That was a mouthful. The Eisenhower matrix is actually very simple.

It's a simple square diagram. It's made of one square divided into four equal pieces. Or if you're more of a spreadsheet person, it's two rows and two columns. There you go. For all of my Excel people out there. Now the two vertical labels are urgent. On the left side and not urgent on the right side, right?

That's your top. The horizontal labels are important. And that's the first row are unimportant. That's the second row. Now I know this is an audio show, so I need you guys to visualize this in your head. Uh, if you're listening to this, instead of watching the YouTube version, I'm not actually even putting up a picture on the YouTube version.

This is [00:05:00] really simple guys. Don't overcomplicate it, right? So two rows by two columns, according to productivity expert, James clear, you can understand the items in each of the four quadrants with this simple freight framework as well. Do decide delegate don't do or delete. So the first quadrant that would be the top left of your squares is.

Urgent and important. Now, these are the due tasks, right? These are items that are both urgent and important, and they therefore demand your action right away. Items in this quadrant will typically include crisis issues or issues with set deadlines. One example might be a fire in your kitchen. That becomes urgent and important, right?

Or it could be something as simple as deadlines at work or your work schedule. Those are both urgent and important. You have to pay your bills. You have to go to work or they tend not to pay you or just fire you. [00:06:00] So, that's quadrant number one, and that's the top left quadrant if you're looking at this square.

Decide on what to deal with, with the task in quadrant two. These are important, but not urgent. This is the top right quadrant of your square. These are essential issues, but they're not urgent, therefore they don't require your immediate action. So these items, you'll want to schedule in later, put them on your calendar, make sure you set time aside for them.

Quadrant two items are typically tasked... Are projects that you can help you personally or professionally or help your business achieve a long term goal. Now down in quadrant three, that's the bottom left. You're tracking delegate the task in quadrant three. These are not important, but they are urgent items.

These urgent items that may pop up and demand immediate attention, but because they're not [00:07:00] necessary. Are critical. They don't necessarily require your time and they can therefore be assigned to somebody else. So if you have people in your life that you can have help you with these tasks because you need to focus on other things are in your work paradigm, uh, this is something that you get an assistant to do are someone else in the organization that's not necessarily tasked with the urgency of some of your other tasks.

Examples of these items would be requests for help from colleagues or emails March urgent. It's the content of these interruptions. If the content of these interruptions don't rise to your level of importance, delegate them to others. I know I can hear it now. Not everybody has somebody that can delegate stuff to welcome to my life.

I understand. I didn't say it was perfect. Now let's get to quadrant four. This is the bottom right hand corner of the Eisenhower matrix. [00:08:00] Delete the items in quadrant four. They're neither urgent nor important. These are the items in your Eisenhower matrix that are not. Essential, urgent, critical. These are things that aren't even really important.

So you can, in most cases, erase them from your list. Quadrant four items include things like scrolling through Facebook, checking Twitter, playing games. These are tasks that are okay if you have time or need a break from more important or more urgent items, but they shouldn't displace anything else on your list of priorities.

We've talked about that many times on the show, how there are things we do to entertain ourselves and sometimes take us away from actually being productive and doing things we need to get done. Now, guys, this is one decision making paradigm. And we talked about some other ones on the show. The Eisenhower makeup matrix is not a perfect thing.

However, as you apply it to your personal life, as you apply it to [00:09:00] business stuff, if you apply it to work things, right? And start applying this, you will actually start to see patterns emerge that will help you clarify what's important to you and what matters in your life. When you start making decisions in that urgent and important square and things that fall into important, but.

Not urgent. And then you get into that lower section. You're going to find out there are things that they demand your time, but they aren't necessarily a priority in your life. If you apply this to your personal life, you'll find for a lot of people, they put family and relationships into the important category, but maybe not into the urgent category.

If you're putting them in the urgent category, which I think they are, but that's my opinion. Maybe you don't have to agree with that. You will find that. A lot of the decisions [00:10:00] you make in life will reflect that as well. I told you, I just had to make some new decisions in my life. Uh, if you've been following the channel or my social media, you know, it's been a busy several weeks, a couple of months actually, with a lot of changes going on in my life.

And recently I had to employ this paradigm into my life. I had to decide what was important and urgent, what was important, but not urgent. And so on and such forth. Now for me, it's actually fairly straightforward because I have a pretty solid idea of what my priorities are. That wasn't something I came to automatically or just easily.

That was something that I've garnered over 43 years of life. I've got my priorities preset. But for some people figuring out those priorities can take a while using this paradigm, the Eisenhower matrix, you'll actually start to see that pattern emerge. And so if you're not a hundred percent sure what your [00:11:00] priorities are in life, applying this concept for decision making will actually help you start to weed those out and make those clear, not weed out as in battles and weed out and identify what those are for you.

And we'll hopefully make future decisions a lot easier because you'll figure out exactly what those priorities are. Guys, if you enjoyed the episode, if it helped you, be sure and subscribe, leave us a review, share it with a friend. That's the ultimate compliment. That's the ultimate compliment you give us is sharing this with somebody else.

You think my benefit from it. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Be better tomorrow because of what you do today. We'll see you on the next one. This has been the Fable Man Podcast. Your home for everything, man, husband, and father. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a show. Head over to www.thefollowableman.com for more content and get your own fallible man gear.[00:12:00]