Eisenhower's approach, as both a general and president, was to assemble a very good staff and delegate, while monitoring how things were going. Staff, not line. Line managers in the military are unit commanders at various levels. Staff officers, derided though they tend to be, are extensions of the commander for whom they work. They have to be very competent but less ambitious than line commanders.
"The Hidden-Hand Presidency" (1982) is the best overview of how Eisenhower got things done. Eisenhower was probably the only person ever to be overqualified for the US presidency. Holding the Allied coalition together while winning WWII in Europe was a tougher job. As president, he was fairly relaxed and not overworked, while accomplishing an incredible amount.
He wasn't as laid back as people thought at the time. He wrote clear, incisive directives for his staff and Cabinet. It took a long time before Eisenhower's work was properly analyzed, partly because the Eisenhower Library is in Abilene, Kansas, and few historians wanted to spend a few years there going through the files.
I'd like to submit Leslie Groves as another extremely gifted administrator who got big things done inside big organizations. There need to be more studies about his "methods".
There are. He himself wrote "Now it can be Told". The 1998 "The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project" is hard to get, but good. Groves, at peak, had quite an empire - not just the bomb project, but his own air force and his own State Department.
The head of the USSR's atomic bomb project was Lavrentiy Beria. Yes, that Beria, head of the secret police and responsible for various purges and genocides. Yet he successfully ran the atomic bomb program. After the bomb worked, the people who would have been executed if it failed got Hero of the Soviet Union medals. The people who merely would have been sent to gulags got the next medal below that.
Actually no it was not. It's more that power was distributed differently. The speaker of the house, the master of the Senate had real power. Power that now rests with interest groups.
If you are interested read Robert Caro's Master of the Senate.
Best productivity story from this book: a White House worker brings President Eisenhower a piece of unopened mail addressed to the President. Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope” and he drills into his team that nothing comes to the President unless it can’t be resolved at a lower level, and when it comes to him he needs to be briefed and presented with his staff’s best thinking and possible options.
> Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope”
This is correct to the best of my knowledge; the actual opening of said mail should have been handled by the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, established in 1897.
I was a bit curious about what this process looks like in relatively modern times, and found this video from the President Obama White House YouTube channel from 2009:
I think there are a few things to note to take the Eisenhower matrix from “oh, that’s a nice model” to really gain some serious value from it.
First of all, you need to really work with finding the most important goals for you in your context. Then you figure out what the most important things you could do to achieve this goal in for example the next two years.
Then you will realize you don’t have time to add these things on top of your current workload (like in Scrum, you don’t add new tasks to a sprint without removing other tasks). And when you’ve done that, it’s time to bring forth the Eisenhower matrix.
And in the light of what is truly important, sort your tasks according to the matrix. A key here is also to really think about the Important axis as not important in general but important that You do. Then your job is to delete or delegate enough to be able to fit the new tasks that are the most valuable to achieve your goal.
Also, in the article it says to do the non urgent important tasks after the urgent ones. I think this is really bad thinking. Instead, in the matrix you can see it tells you to plan these things. That’s what you should listen to. The things that are important but not urgent needs to be planned, otherwise they will never get done as there are always too much urgent things to do.
This matrix is great. If you're the type who gets lost in fiddling with productivity app UIs, and in general overthinking it, this 2x2 quantization (just one nybble!) might be part of the cure.
That being said, I think 3x3 might be even more helpful. If I drag a task into an Eisenhower Matrix, I'd like the drop point (done using a non-verbal part of my brain) to benefit from a bit of spontaneous intuition.
Also, the upper right (Important but not Urgent) is the Zone of Neglect(TM), where good things go to die. I'd like an app to any every item in that sector and prompt me to break it down into steps. Then it's easier to get started, and it's easier to make stepwise progress.
If you look at it thinking it would never work in practice for your situation...you're probably right. There's a lot of underlying assumptions, and as any simple and catchy idea, it only helps as much as nudge for you to find your own system to deal with your issues.
Yes. Another one is deciding if something important with a far away deadline is urgent or not.
I'd need to first know how long it would take to deal with it, estimate how much of a margin of error I can allow myself, and then guess weither something will throw a wrench in my schedule making it impossible to deal with that task when it's due.
I often break down tasks like that into "finding out/planning" and "the rest of it" - so the first task would be important and urgent. The other would not, until I've decided.
The joke on an old team of mine was that because there was always enough important/urgent work to keep us busy (partly because leadership treated too much as urgent), the important/not urgent stuff never happened, or never happened until it became urgent. Which leads to some problems. But I do think when you’re feeling overwhelmed with stuff it can be a useful categorization system for what you can put aside.
I used to work for a Stephen Covey fan that had us think according to this quadrant. The main tension was between working ahead on important projects (doing quad 2 before it hits quad 1) without accidentally doing irrelevant quadrant 4 work instead. Staying in true quad 2 for most of the week was brain-burning.
It was fun to poke her about her quad 3 work becoming my quad 1. :) We were encouraged to help our managers prevent that from happening to us by building better systems (quad 2.) Low tolerance for recurring busywork.
Good lessons for this young employee from this framework being seriously applied in a team environment.
As with most productivity hacks, the real benefit comes from thinking about what you're doing, sometimes, instead of just doing things. Just like diets.
I’m to the point where if you can’t explain your point in a couple of paragraphs on a clickbaity title I’m gonna exit and then dismiss it as AI generated SEO slop and that’s what this feels like. Can anyone summarize?
Do (urgent and important). Ng says these tasks are at the core of your job. They are the things you were hired to do and have an upcoming deadline attached to them. Make these your most important tasks.
Decide (not urgent but important). These tasks are core to your job and goals, too, but their deadline is much further out. Decide if you have the time to advance them, but only after you’ve finished your more urgent tasks.
Delegate (urgent but not important). These tasks have a deadline but aren’t core to your job responsibilities. Paperwork and office surveys live and breed in this quadrant. If you can, delegate these tasks to someone else. If not, don’t spend a lot of time on them. And if you find yourself running out of time, move them to the delete quadrant when possible.
Delete (neither urgent nor important). Ng says it best, “[These] are the things to get rid of because they’re just crowding out your desk space, your drive space, your head space and causing you to not be able to focus on what really matters.” Delete, and don’t look back.
The funny thing in real life is that paperwork and "boring" tasks can rarely be delegated or will need a cost/benefit analysis that becomes in itself a task.
For instance taxes. Will you pay an accountant for your taxes ? Either you have enough money to not care, either it's a non obvious trade-off and you need to decide how much you'd be paying vs how much your own time costs and what opportunity you'd lose/gain from there (including not getting fine grained knowledge about how your taxes work)
Or for our field, PR/MR reviews. where do they fall, and will you spend time on them or pass the bucket ?
Right. If you are doing paperwork, it’s probably because you are doing someone else’s urgent but unimportant task that they delegated to you. And you have to do some paperwork to leave a paper trail so it’s easier to find where you messed up when the task doesn’t get done.
As a software developer, I think I should be almost exclusively working in the top right (important, not urgent). If there is something I need to do urgently then I view this as someone (maybe me) screwing up.
It's also not obvious to me why "urgent, not important" gets handled any differently to "not urgent, not important", except that you have to be extra vigilant not to be distracted by the former.
A lot of people are overwhelmed with "urgent" tasks and in that state, they find it hard to even realise that some are more important than others. The discipline to say no, I'll do this one really important thing first and everything else can wait isn't something everybody is born with.
People inherently understand that there's stuff you can throw someone or money at it. You don't need a long explaination to teach someone that hiring a maid or ordering a meal will help them if they don't have time to cook and it's not important to them. They might need a lesson on delegation, but these quadrants aren't that (you can effectively delegate important and urgent tasks if you have enough trust)
Same for stuff that doesn't matter, people don't need a guide on procrastinating away those tasks (nobody's asking if they should skip their local bookclub events they don't care about)
The question is naturally what to do about the stuff that won't go away and need to be done sooner or later. And to be honest, the approach of doing it in order isn't a bad one if you get to do it all regardless of the relative importance within the queue.
Basically, why do tough choices if you don't need to in the first place ?
One reason the Eisenhower matrix is a good productivity tool is that it's simple and fast. It doesn't leave much room for fiddling with it or optimizing the process. Many of today's apps are overly complex, allowing users to tinker with them so much that little to no time is left for actually doing tasks.
In our experience ( we run a body-doubling platform for remote workers), complex productivity tools don't work, especially for procrastinators. They may be helpful once someone is already productive and organized, but not before. A good rule of thumb is to throw away tools that have a lot of features or complex decision trees.
I've moved on from a method like this to an even simpler one: Do The Most Important Thing Now.
It's usually completely obvious what the most important thing that I need to do is. And if it's not then I can ask other people around me and clarify. When that's done, The next Most Important Thing is obvious again.
Mostly this is about software product dev where The Most Important Thing is a feature or bug fix or something that's going to take a few hours at least. It's mainly about not shoving thousands of ideas into the Backlog where they will just never get done. Instead of a whole development plan that gets caught up in old assumptions and stale priorities, just Do The Most Important Thing Now and keep doing it. At some point The Most Important Thing will be shipping the product in time for the marketing event.
I use a simplified version, that doesn't require as much care in the planning phase:
1. Delegate as much as possible.
2. Alternate urgent and important tasks.
3. Once in a while do a "fun" task - something neither urgent, nor immediately important, but feels like it may have a payoff someday.
I feel if there's more nuance on the urgency dimension than just "urgent" and "not urgent".
I judge problems in the urgency dimension by "what will happen if I don't do this?" Will my boss be angry at me? Will I get fired? Will there be fines (e.g. tax paid late)? Will a potentially incurable disease be detected too late if I delay this medical appointment? etc.
Two tasks due next week, one of which will officially miss a deadline but not much will happen if I do it a day later, vs. a tax deadline, I'd better work on the tax first, so if it happens that there isn't enough time to do both then at least I've done the one which would have the worst consequences for not doing it.
If I remember correctly, Ike said that tasks can be important or urgent, but never both.
So it makes me laugh that the 2x2 matrix lives on. It has always seemed to me that Ike was getting at a 1x2 matrix (or perhaps a 1x3: important or urgent or neither) and that the real question to ask is whether the task under consideration is important or not.
Then, of course, we need to discipline ourselves to perform important tasks that have no clear deadlines.
Sounds a lot like making people more machine-like. I hate stuff like this. If we have to do stuff like this to "function" in the world, then we have already lost our humanity. Our world should not be so obsessed by productivity in the first place.
I disagree. I think it's more likely that technology itself is causing us to change our way of thinking, and we think we want to do this stuff but actually we are just resources for the machine.
I don’t think the distinction between urgent and important is a modern one.
The overgrown lawn may seem urgent to mow but if that’s my only free time this week maybe I should hire someone to do it so I can see a financial planner to make sure I am gonna be good in X decades. Etc.
This seems like an out of context step in a multi-layered system.
Layer foo: Story arc. What story are you trying to tell when you get out of bed?
Layer bar: Things you have to do to make the story.
Layer baz: A weekly agenda which you execute on.
This is stupid simplistic. But the point is that different layers require different states of mind. As with writing and editing, you could do the first layer drunk, then the last layer sober.
Jumping straight to some list of things to act on doesn't work for me unless there is someone already taking care of the other layers. If all I have to do is walk in the office, look at the board, put the fries on the tray, and shout "order #23" then I'm good with that. Working from home, I have to do everything myself. The delegate box might as well be some goofy prize I get after I just do the thing myself.
It is how you're supposed to do things. Indeed, it is how most people on Earth accomplish every single task in their life whether they realize it or not.
I wish I was morally bankrupt enough to be a productivity guru. I could, like, charge $50k to stand behind a podium in a hotel ballroom and spout nonsense at desperate people in an attempt to get them to buy my book and planners. It would be awesome.
I could explain the basics of GTD to you in 30 seconds. It’s conceptually pretty easy. The idea of approaching it in a systematic, repeatable way is non-obvious, and I happily paid David Allen for his book to explain how to implement the simple ideas.
> I wish I was morally bankrupt enough to be a productivity guru. I could, like, charge $50k to stand behind a podium in a hotel ballroom and spout nonsense at desperate people in an attempt to get them to buy my book and planners. It would be awesome.
Of course it’s your morals, and not that nobody in the whole world cares what “snakeyjake” wants to say about productivity.
Eisenhower's approach, as both a general and president, was to assemble a very good staff and delegate, while monitoring how things were going. Staff, not line. Line managers in the military are unit commanders at various levels. Staff officers, derided though they tend to be, are extensions of the commander for whom they work. They have to be very competent but less ambitious than line commanders.
"The Hidden-Hand Presidency" (1982) is the best overview of how Eisenhower got things done. Eisenhower was probably the only person ever to be overqualified for the US presidency. Holding the Allied coalition together while winning WWII in Europe was a tougher job. As president, he was fairly relaxed and not overworked, while accomplishing an incredible amount.
He wasn't as laid back as people thought at the time. He wrote clear, incisive directives for his staff and Cabinet. It took a long time before Eisenhower's work was properly analyzed, partly because the Eisenhower Library is in Abilene, Kansas, and few historians wanted to spend a few years there going through the files.