Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

Over the past several months, we have converged on a set of slides that we fill out at the start of a week.

Slide 1: To do list.

Slide 2: <Fill items from the todo list into this 2x2 matrix>

    |                | Not important | Important now |
    |                | now           |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|                 
    | Not actionable |               |               |
    | now            |               |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|
    | Actionable now |               |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|

Slide 3: We pick the most important of the important now/actionable now quadrant and break that down into action items.

Over time, this has proven to be incredibly powerful at focusing us on the things that matter while not losing track of how everything else are evolving.

This is very similar to the Eisenhower Matrix except you swapped "urgent" for "actionable". Not to discredit, I just think it’s an interesting difference. Seems like a startup mentality to me. I think declaring something as unactionable can do oneself a disservice, but it’s also a totally reasonable call to make.

Urgent + Important = Do now

Urgent + Not Important = Delegate

Not Urgent + Important = Schedule for later

Not Urgent + Not Important = Drop

> Seems like a startup mentality to me.

Good insight :) I'll leave it at that.

Indeed, it started with the Eisenhower Matrix, but the problem for us was that everything is Urgent in some sense. Things that aren't urgent don't usually make it to the top of our list.

On the other hand, we needed a mechanism to track things that we couldn't actually make forward progress on, despite it being urgent. These are the "Not actionable" items - usually because they're blocked on something else.

The final point I'll make is that the most valuable part in this exercise is actually reaching consensus on what quadrant to put an item in. It's superb at getting alignment.

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