Dec 4

Dec 4 Eisenhower Box

Hi, I'm Liz Moser, and I'm a Mayo Certified Wellness Coach. Today I want to talk about a method of organizing and prioritizing your day, week even your life.

President Dwight D Eisenhower created this tool aptly named the Eisenhower Box.

Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing tasks is relatively simple. Using this decision matrix, you will separate your activities based on four possibilities.

1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).

2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).

3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).

4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate or minimize.)

This forces us to look at our lives and differentiate between urgent and important tasks. Because as Eisenhower said:

What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is rarely important.

Urgent tasks are things that you feel like you need to react to, such as emails, phone calls, texts, or news stories.

While important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals.

Then, after you enter your daily actions or to-do’s into the matrix, all we have to do is eliminate items ( before optimizing.)

In other words, there is no faster way to do something than not doing it at all. I don't mean to sound flippant, and that’s not a reason to be lazy, but rather a suggestion for you to make some hard decisions and delete any task that does not lead you toward your mission, your values, and your goals.

As Tim Ferriss author of the 4-Hour Work Week says, “Being busy is not the same as being productive, in fact, being busy is a form of laziness--lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”

It can be challenging to eliminate time-wasting activities if you aren't sure what’s important to you or what motivates you. Keeping the answers to these two questions in mind while filling in your Eisenhower box will help you answer:

1. What are the core values that drive my life?

2. What am I working toward?

Let’s take a look at my cursory Eisenhower Box.

The upper left box is urgent and important (tasks I will do immediately): write blogs and shoot videos

The upper right box is important, but not urgent (tasks I will schedule to do later): workout, meditation, office tasks, reading/learning, connecting with my partner and socializing with friends.

The lower left box is urgent, but not important (tasks I will delegate to someone else): taxes, grocery shopping, and delivery, house cleaning

The lower right box is neither urgent nor important (tasks that I will eliminate or minimize.): social media, TV, online shopping, phone games

My on-going challenge is how much social media, TV, and downtime in general, to include in my life. Some are necessary to recharge my batteries, yet much of it is distracting and time-wasting.

I’m Liz Moser, a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach, and if you have any questions about the Eisenhower Box, or if you have any questions about health and wellness or wellness coaching, please email me at lizm@lizmosercoaching.com.