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.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that everything I’ve learned is something younger or newer people are learning or haven’t learned yet.
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 ?
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.
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 ?
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.
Divide a square into four quarters. Mark two rows as important and not important. And two columns as urgent and not urgent.
Try to bin all your tasks into these categories, and focus on the urgent and important ones. The rest can be decided later, delegated or thrown away.