Delete Life’s Chaos Today: How the Eisenhower Matrix Can Help You Prioritize What Matters

Delete Life’s Chaos Today: How the Eisenhower Matrix Can Help You Prioritize What Matters

Let’s delve into the chaos of life for a minute, an intricate web of events, experiences, and emotions. Amidst the complications of life, it’s essential to find ways to manage and organize the chaos that surrounds us. From juggling daily tasks to pursuing our passions, life demands us to equip ourselves with techniques, talents, opportunities, and tools that aid us in keeping pace.

In this article, let’s dive into a tool, a talent, and a skill set that can prove to be immensely valuable in navigating through the ebbs and flows of life. This skillset can serve as a foundation to help you keep all the other facets of your life in check.

Managing Life’s Chaos

Have you ever seen those old films where a man is spinning multiple plates at once? Maybe it’s a clown, or Chinese acrobats doing it while they walk around the stage, but either way it’s an impressive feat and one that teaches us a valuable lesson about managing our lives. Plate spinning is a skill that can help us juggle multiple objectives. Plate spinning may be a useful skill in life, but it’s not the ultimate goal of life itself. In today’s modern world we often lose sight of this.

As you start to achieve success and live the life you’ve always wanted, chaos does not only not disappear, but it multiplies. The chaos of success is different from the chaos of feeling lost or directionless. When you’re successful, new opportunities and challenges arise constantly, and you must learn how to manage and navigate them.

Learning how to spin plates is a useful tool for managing the chaos of success. It’s a metaphor for managing multiple priorities and keeping everything moving forward. But it’s important to remember that plate spinning is not the endgame. Instead, it’s about achieving the life you desire and being able to let go of the things you don’t want in your life. It’s about creating the life you want while actually being able to enjoy it. This is no small feat, in fact, it’s a feat that makes spinning 10 plates seem simple.

Initially, living your legend can feel overwhelming, like you’re spinning a lot of plates to keep everything going. But eventually, you’ll have to figure out a system to prioritize your life and decide what truly matters. This is living life on purpose and not simply living by default.

It’s important to note that the goal is not to do more and more, but to live the life you truly want – to do more and more of what you love while being bothered less and less by the chaos that surrounds it. Plate spinning can help you manage multiple priorities, but it’s not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution is to prioritize your life and focus on the things that truly matter.

The Eisenhower Matrix: A Tool for Prioritizing Your Life

Now, we’re going to transport ourselves to World War II. Actually, not all of World War II, but we’re going to go to take a look at the general who oversaw the Allied Nations winning of World War II- Dwight D. Eisenhower. Imagine being in charge of all the Allied troops inside of all of the World War II European theater and the Asian Pacific theater at the same time. Dwight Eisenhower directed half of the earth in the ultimate battle of good and evil and did it successfully. Beyond World War II he got us out of the Korean War as president. He resisted getting us into Vietnam, and he even ended up sending the 101st airborne, the same guys who liberated us who took down Hitler to make sure that schools were desegregated. This guy ended up right on so many things throughout history and he did it by mastering the art of prioritization. Most of us could not imagine doing any ONE of those things, much less all of them, and much much more.

But how exactly did he do it? He used a tool that’s now called the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is a four-quadrant system that divides your project, or issue, or entire life into four categories: things that are IMPORTANT & URGENT, things that are IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT, things that are urgent but not important, and things that are NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT.

We’re going to cover each of these quadrants and talk about what they mean and how you can use this tool to prioritize your life in a meaningful way to you. The Eisenhower Matrix is a powerful tool that can help you live the life you demand and achieve your goals. You can’t be everything, but you can be anything. In order to be the anything you actually want, you’ll have to prioritize your time and energy and there is simply no better tool to help you.

By using the Eisenhower Matrix, you can identify what’s truly important in your life and focus on those things. You can also identify what’s not important and eliminate those things from your life. This tool will help you make sure that you’re living your legend and achieving the life you desire and not just doing a bunch of low level tasks that will never get you anywhere.

In the following sections, we’ll explore each of the quadrants in more detail and provide practical tips for applying the Eisenhower Matrix to your life. By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of how to prioritize your time and focus on the things that matter most.

IMPORTANT & URGENT

Let’s talk about some things that we won’t need to spend any effort to focus on. If you look at the very top left corner of the Eisenhower Matrix, you have things that are IMPORTANT & URGENT. Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, Coach Kevin, if it’s important and it’s urgent, why don’t we need to focus on it?” The answer is simple: because it’s going to happen regardless. Because this is something that is already “ON FIRE” in your life and it will demand your attention. No prioritization needed.

When something is IMPORTANT & URGENT, it’s easy to prioritize, because there are immediate and painful consequences for not doing it. These fires that are raging in your life right now. Most people spend the vast majority of their time putting out these fires. But we don’t need to put any extra focus there. We need to create enough time, space, and attention to handle these things, but we don’t have to put a lot of extra effort there because they’re going to happen regardless.

For example, if your house is on fire, that’s IMPORTANT & URGENT. You need to handle it immediately, or people die and your house burns down. You won’t add it to a list and plan for it – it’s just happening. Similarly, if you get pulled over by the police, pulling over to the side of the road is IMPORTANT & URGENT, but it’s not something that requires a lot of focus or attention – you just do it. We know what we need to do in these situations, and we can handle them quickly and efficiently. There is little need to prioritize or plan for this.

Of course, there are times when big things happen, and we need to put our focus there. But when it comes to creating our lives and living on purpose, we need to understand that IMPORTANT & URGENT things will happen on their own and we will handle them as they do. Our focus needs to be on the other quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix, where we can make a real difference in our lives.

NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT

Next, we’re going to explore the total opposite side of the Eisenhower Matrix: the NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT quadrant. If something is NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT, then what do we need to do with it? The answer is simple: get rid of it. These are the things that are time-wasters and serve no purpose in our lives. Examples include endless scrolling on social media without a purpose or watching TV aimlessly.

To determine whether something is urgent or not, ask yourself: can I put it off without any negative consequences? If the answer is yes, then it’s not urgent. For instance, owing someone 50 cents is not urgent. But if your house is on fire, that’s urgent, and you must handle it immediately.

The NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT quadrant is where life has no demand for you to be there because there’s no purpose for you to be there. It’s a place where you’ve decided to “f$3! off” and waste time. These are the things that we need to eliminate from our lives.

Remember that time wasted purposefully – is not wasted at all. Sometimes intentional rest and recovery are necessary, and that time can be important. However, this is a deliberate decision, and we must decide that recovery and regeneration are essential. This is not the same as wasting time without a purpose. Not all scrolling is bad – just unintentional default scrolling that we don’t purposefully choose and create.

Basically, the NOT IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT quadrant is where we need to let go of and delete things that serve no purpose in our lives. By getting rid of time-wasters, we can focus on the things that truly matter and achieve our goals. In the next section, we’ll explore the IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT quadrant and provide practical tips for prioritizing these tasks.

NOT IMPORTANT & URGENT

You might be wondering how something can be urgent but not important to you. The answer is simple: other people have asked you to do it. It could be your boss, landlord, or the government asking you to pay your taxes by a specific deadline. These tasks are not necessarily important to you, but they’re urgent because someone else has imposed a deadline.

When you’re faced with tasks that are NOT IMPORTANT & URGENT, it’s essential to delegate them to others in your team or start saying no to things that don’t align with your priorities. Remember, just because something is urgent doesn’t mean it’s important, or worth doing at all, to you.

One common example of something urgent but not important is a retail sale that creates a sense of urgency to buy something we didn’t need in the first place. As humans, we often confuse urgency with importance, but it’s crucial to differentiate between the two. By saying “no” to things that are not important, and/or delegating the things we cannot outright say “no” to, we can combat the lower quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix and eliminate time-wasting activities from our lives.

We want to be playing life in the top quadrant of this matrix as often as possible. Staying out of the lower half of the matrix is the key to living on purpose and to living the life you want.

Of course, it’s important to rest and play, but it’s crucial to do so intentionally. Play and rest on purpose and eliminate things that are not important. Time is precious, and we shouldn’t waste it on things that don’t matter to us.

IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT

Now let’s delve into the last quadrant, the top right quadrant, which is important and not urgent. Here, you’ll find things like relationships, business, long-term goals, and exercise. These are important, but not urgent because they can always be put off. However, this is the most fertile and important ground for living your legend and having a life you want and are proud of.

We often discuss what kind of life we demand to live. Remember, the top left core quadrant, which is IMPORTANT & URGENT, is what life is demanding of us. We don’t need to put much focus there since life will force us to deal with it.

When we talk about the IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT quadrant, things get interesting because although they are important, they can be put off. Here’s the crazy part, things in the non-urgent quadrant eventually become urgent and important. For instance, taxes on January 1st are no big deal, but on April 14th, they become very urgent. As you start living on purpose, demanding things of your life, and saying, “This is the life I demand to live,” you’ll have to move the IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT into the urgent category. That’s what we do with our weekly mission targets and outcomes. We take things that can otherwise be put off and say, “No, I’m not going to put it off. I’m going to prioritize what I want because I am making the demands of my life for myself.”

The things in the IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT category are opportunities for us to not just have life demand things of us, but also demand things of ourselves and life. This will happen as you set outcomes and weekly mission targets. You’ll want to be very present and pick things that are IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT. The way to do this is to ask yourself if this absolutely must happen in your life. If it can be put off, give it a point value, which will add urgency to it. This means you’re setting the fires in your life on purpose, and what you’ll find is that no fire ever started by accident.

Your life becomes something that you design and build on purpose, and you’re lighting fire after fire, blazing a trail of those fire-resistance habits around you. You’re taking control of your life and setting priorities that matter to you. It’s up to you to decide what is important and what is urgent. The most important thing is to start taking things in your life and asking if they’re important or urgent. If the answer is “No,” drop it.

The more you live in IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT the less there is to do in URGENT & IMPORTANT. Why? Because you already took care of it when it wasn’t urgent. So you can actually get out ahead of the waves of life and surf on them instead of being behind, or crushed by them. You start living how you want, when you want, the way you have always wanted because you had the discipline to live in IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT.

Remember, if you want to live on purpose, you’re going to have to do the hard work worth doing. Setting priorities that matter in your life for yourself is one of those things. Live on purpose, pull from what is IMPORTANT & NOT URGENT, and add urgency to those things and you will be a living legend.