Lead On with Greg & Mark (LOwGaM)
We invite you to join us as we talk about the world of leadership during times of complexity.
Lead On with Greg & Mark (LOwGaM)
S3: E13 From Cult Classics to Cutting Edge Tactics: A Look at the Urgent-Important Matrix
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Cracking the code of productivity isn't just about hard work—it's about smart work. That's why this episode doesn't just entertain; it enlightens, as we explore the Eisenhower Principle and the Urgent-Important Matrix.
This timeless tool's relevance in today's hustle culture offers a practical example to help you tackle the daily grind. We'll cover President Eisenhower's famous quote: "What's important is seldom urgent, and what's urgent is seldom important" and connect it to a famous 2x2 matrix of importance and urgency that you'll want saved on your phone and printed next to your desk.
Whether you're a boardroom warrior or a domestic deity, understanding what's urgent, what's important, what's a mix of both, and what's neither could well be your ticket to efficiency nirvana.
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You're listening to Lead On with Greg and Mark, brought to you by the Pennsylvania Association of Intermediate Units. Join us this season as we engage in conversations on leading on through times of complexity. Now for your hosts, Greg and Mark.
Speaker 2Hello there Dr Mark Hoffman.
Speaker 3Howdy, howdy how.
Speaker 1Howdy, how. Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 2Oh, Gregory, Gregory, Gregory. Hey, I am seven of eight on the movie challenge, you are seven of eight Not to remind you. You are seven of eight. You're putting me to shame. I'm like seven and a half.
Speaker 3Actually, no, it's a full seven, because I definitely didn't recognize that line, but I knew the movie at least.
Speaker 2You're going to be walking around this office proud as a peacock.
Speaker 3I'm not going to say through that door, you're not. I know my head won't fit through the door.
Speaker 2Well, you almost bump your head when you go through doorway.
Speaker 3It is true, I definitely have smashed my forehead quite a bit.
Speaker 2You have four more for me, I have four more. So this for listeners who haven't heard the previous two episodes. I threw the gauntlet back down and we're doing the 80s movie quote challenge with Dr Mark Hoffman, aka Hasselhoff. Here we go. That maniac was our mailman.
Speaker 3The maniac was our mailman. So I'm thinking Funny Farm, right Dude, that's it.
Speaker 2Is it really? Yeah, that's Funny Farm.
Speaker 3I love you trying to get that, yeah, he would go through.
Speaker 2And he goes. Who was that? That maniac was our mailman. It was the wife.
Speaker 3Yeah, so yeah, I love that movie so good. I love that movie and I love how, in the end, she's the one who becomes the author.
Speaker 2Yeah, she becomes the author. Yeah, and I like when they're out of food and they're just sitting there and all he hears is his wife is chewing an apple.
Speaker 3The last apple. He's got the new record for lamb fries.
Speaker 2A new world record.
Speaker 3All right, go ahead.
Speaker 2Okay, here's the next one. That's why they call them crushes. If they were easy, they would call them something else 16 candles.
Speaker 3I'm telling you, yes, you've got it, you've got it yeah.
Speaker 2Go ahead. Yeah, that was Jim Baker, molly Ringwald's father who forgot her birthday. He did. Okay, all right. Her 16th birthday to be exact.
Speaker 3I wonder if it's somebody's birthday. Recently it was the big four, eight, the big four, eight, yeah, looking good, thank you, don't look a day over 50.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's the hairline, maybe, I don't know, looking good. Yeah, thank you, I mean.
Speaker 3I appreciate that I did not wish you a happy birthday, because I didn't even. It wasn't even my radar. That was your birthday. That's a major party. Do you know where my birthday is? No so then it's okay.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3We'll exchange birthday. I think it's what we're doing. I'm January 28th.
Speaker 2Can I share the story about my birthday? Yeah, january 28th, so uh. So I'm going to tell you about my 10th birthday, when I turned 10.
Speaker 2It was 19. I believe this is correct with the date. It was turning 10, 1986 and I was going to Rice Elementary and Mountaintop, pa, at Crestwood School District and anytime there was a big event they would call us down to the LGI large group instruction room. Yeah, and my mom was famous for making chocolate chip cookies like the best, the best. So she made cookies. She would always do it for our birthday, so I brought them in in the morning. I'm all proud of them. I'm thinking we're going down to the LGI to celebrate my birthday. Of course you are. So we went in and it was the day of the Challenger exploding. Oh geez, it was January 28th 1986.
Speaker 3That's heavy.
Speaker 2So I met, you know it was a big deal.
Speaker 3We were all watching it.
Speaker 2It was. It was a tough one because especially because there was a teacher there.
Speaker 3Chris McCullough and we were all watching it. Yeah, it was a big deal. Teacher in space.
Speaker 2Yeah, it really was. It really was, but that's, you'll never forget my birthday now.
Speaker 3We will never forget, yeah, my birthday May 8th.
Speaker 2I didn't mean to mean to bring us down there, but that's what happened.
Speaker 3See, I told you when's my birthday.
Speaker 2You didn't say, I just did. What'd you say? May 8th, it already goes. We have to talk about is May 8th May 8th. So three days after Cinco de Mayo.
Speaker 3Cinco de Mayo.
Speaker 2I had. That's how I remember things.
Speaker 3Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day.
Speaker 2What is it?
Speaker 3Everyone thinks it is. It's the day that the the Mexican army defeated the French, kicked them out of their country. It celebrates a major win.
Speaker 2Oh.
Speaker 3So there you go. But everybody thinks it's, it's not their fourth of July All right, let's keep going.
Speaker 2Okay, things that make you go, hmm, all right. So look up here, look up here, look up here.
Speaker 3Look up here, look up here, look up here. I don't know it, but so I'll take that as a loss. Okay, now give me some hints, if I can get it.
Speaker 2I'm going to say it differently this time. Look up here. Look up here. Look up here. Does that help? No, Look up here, Steve Martin, up in the tree as they're breaking in over a wall and he's saying he's he's queuing his other fellow friend to go up over. I think it was Martin Short.
Speaker 3Oh, is this the three amigos? It's the three amigos. Oh my God.
Speaker 2That's where they're breaking in, in the very beginning El guapo, el guapo.
Speaker 3Blue shadows.
Speaker 2Oh my little buttercup has a sweetest smile.
Speaker 3I know the movie. I did not get that quote Okay.
Speaker 2Okay, so the very last one. I don't know if you're going to get this one Back off, man, I'm a scientist.
Speaker 3Back off, man, I'm a scientist. Back off, it's not the fly, is it?
Speaker 2It's not the fly, I don't know Go ahead.
Speaker 3Give me more hints, hints. That's a loss.
Speaker 2OK, all right, so you're two for four on this. Ok, so give me some hints. It has to do with science, weird science. It's not weird science. That would have been good, that would have been good, but it has to do with three individuals again. Just like the three amigos, but they help to save a city from.
Speaker 3Oh, Ghostbusters yeah.
Speaker 2There you go, got it, there you go. That was Peter Volkman, venkman, venkman. See, you know this, you know these. How do you know their names, their character names?
Speaker 3I just missed the quotes, but I know the names.
Speaker 2Dr Peter Venkman, aka Bill Murray. Bill Murray, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3Phenomenal, phenomenal.
Speaker 2Murray, great humor.
The Urgent vs Important Matrix
Speaker 3I'm a little upset that I didn't get that one, but I but listen. The three amigos and Ghostbusters are classics. Full credit to you for picking quotes.
Speaker 1I didn't recognize it. It wasn't small wonder.
Speaker 2She's a small wonder.
Speaker 1That song haunts me now because everybody's showing me what it is, of course.
Speaker 2Hey Coons, check out this theme song.
Speaker 3I feel like I'm a little redone because I at least know these movies Go home. You did very well, thank you, and I appreciate the challenge yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, you're welcome, you're welcome.
Speaker 3And so I missed the.
Speaker 2The pleasure was all yours, sure was all mine.
Speaker 3Let's talk a little bit about a leadership dynamic that everyone feels, regardless of the position they're in, and I think we feel it at home and at work, and it goes by many names, but some people know it as the Eisenhower principle or the urgency matrix, the urgent versus important matrix. So if I were to describe it to you, dr Coons, I would think of a two by two matrix, which means you know, sort of four squares, yes, all in a almost, you know, like a, like a two by two graph, if you will.
Speaker 3And in the X axis, going along the bottom, you've got your level of urgency. So on the left hand side you've got urgent, on the right hand side you've got not urgent. And then the the Y axis is important. So the bottom half is not important and the top half is very important or important. So, depending on where you are on this matrix, you have four choices Something could be unimportant and not urgent, or, conversely, it could be very important and urgent, or the other two combinations, right, not important but urgent and not urgent but important.
Speaker 1Okay, All right, so you can Google this thing.
Speaker 3If that doesn't make, if my explanation didn't do it justice, you can just simply put in the um, the urgent, important matrix or the Eisenhower principle. Why is this important? It's very important. We are faced with challenges, decisions, junctures, decision points all day long, at home and at work, and oftentimes we don't know how to prioritize.
Speaker 2Correct.
Speaker 3Right. And so a heuristic like this, a tool like this, a matrix like this, it's a nice filter to run a problem, a dilemma or a situation through, to determine is this really urgent? And if it is, I'm going to put it on the urgent side of the column. But is it really important? No, it's not important. Or it is important or is this really important, All right. Well, how urgent is it? It's a way to help you prioritize and evaluate your tasks. Have you ever used something like this?
Speaker 2So I haven't actually used the visual, but I think it would be going through that exercise of actually using this matrix and writing down what the issue is and identifying on here would be very helpful. I also am looking at this and something I think many struggle with on the, there's the urgent, important and urgent, not important crises versus interruptions, because, as we all know, no matter what leadership position you're in, you're gonna have the crises.
Speaker 3And those are the urgent issues that are important.
Speaker 2Urgent issues that are important, but then you're also gonna have even more interruptions Right, which are urgent issues that are not important. You got it, you got it, so that resonates with me right. When I look at that, that definitely comes to mind.
Speaker 3Yeah, so hold that thought, because I wanna talk about how, where we're spending most of our time as leaders. Are you spending most of your time dealing with crises, interruptions, distractions, or goals and planning, which are the other two names of the other boxes we're gonna go around to each box. Okay, is that all right? Okay, that's fine. I started off by saying that this is known as the urgent, important matrix. Also that it's known as the Eisenhower principle or the Eisenhower matrix. You can simply stick both of those in Google and you'll find lots of research. We happen to be referencing something from the CoachingToolsCompanycom. This isn't proprietary to them per se, but I wanna give them full credit for putting it together in a nice, easy to understand package. Why is it called the Eisenhower principle?
Speaker 3He's often quoted he has a lot of quotes but Eisenhower, when he was president, when he was a general, he said what's important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. He said what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. And the reason why these are conflated together is because, of course, you know your two by twos high importance, low importance, high urgency, low urgency and then determining where the situation that you fall is in, you know, on the quadrant, and what do you do about it? So, greg, to your point. Let's start at the top left box High urgency and low importance.
Speaker 2So urgent tasks. We stop what we're currently doing to work on the urgent task instead, so we can think of all these things. Obviously, emergencies. Right before we recorded this podcast, dr Hoffman was working with his staff on whether or not to do a fire drill. Obviously, fire drills, those types of things take precedent. It's an urgent matter.
Speaker 3But is it an urgent matter to do the drill or is that under the goals and planning of important but not urgent?
Speaker 2So I see it almost in the middle.
Speaker 3Yeah right, like in other words, it's gonna stop whatever's going on. Sure, I think the fire alarm going off is definitely urgent and important.
Speaker 2Yes, planning the drill is important, but not urgent and that would go over in the goals and planning side.
Speaker 3Exactly so our team had it planned.
Speaker 2They were ready to go.
Speaker 3They were all prepared. Kudos to my safety and security team, Right. And then the first one. People hear it, they know okay, high urgency, high importance, Planning the drills and making sure that we meet the law and the requirements that every month we do. One High importance, but low urgency, right.
Speaker 3Because they have 12 months to plan that out, and if they do it right, then there's no urgency in implementing it every month. If they do it wrong or they don't do it, then there's a lot of urgency, because then on the 31st day of the month, at the 28th day of the month, we're going. We never did our drill.
Speaker 2Yep right as urgent Right, so that we just talked about important, urgent important and then non-urgent important. So, urgent important being some kind of crisis, of an actual emergency, non-urgent important being the planning.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2The planning that's involved setting goals, progress monitoring, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 3Yeah, there's another matrix that you can Google on top of this, and other thought leaders have put four words with these quadrants. So, in the high importance, high urgent crises box, do so. If something is presented, do it right, right. So if it's not important but urgent, delegate Right. If it's important but not urgent, decide on when you'll do it. So do, delegate, decide. And then, if it's not important and not urgent, delete.
Speaker 2I like it.
Speaker 3So that's the action. So, in other words, you go through this analysis of determining whether something's important or urgent, you evaluate whether it's a crisis in an interruption, a distraction or a goal, and then you decide whether you're going to do delegate, delete or decide on when to do it later. I like this because this ties into the 24 seven access that we now have to our work and therefore the 24 seven access that work has on us. When our parents left work, they didn't carry a smartphone or a laptop.
Speaker 2No no.
Speaker 3And so there was no way that work could really impose on them the way that it does in the 21st century, in 2024 and for the last 20 years, and so I wonder how much of our time as individuals is now consumed in this matrix and different boxes that our parents and previous generations weren't consumed in, because the urgency couldn't find you and the accessibility wasn't there, right.
Speaker 3And without accessibility, the urgency goes down. In other words, like you know, oh my gosh, I don't need to check the scene. How urgent really is it that I'm checking my email at 830 for my smartphone?
Speaker 2So I got to tell you when I first started as a supervisor yeah, you know what they gave me Go ahead, there weren't cell phones.
Speaker 3Blackberry Pager Pager. I had a Pager yeah.
Speaker 2So I would. For those young listeners that we have there, what a Pager was is it's a little little box that you wear on your belt and someone. When they would call the Pager, it would just show you a number and then you needed to physically walk to a desk phone or available phone that's connected to the wall in some way through a wire and actually call back that number. So you didn't necessarily know who that number was. I'm actually recognized the number. So that's, that was my first supervision. I was doing that.
Speaker 3Right, and then you wondered yourself, like, how urgent really were those Pager calls that you were getting? They really weren't. So I like this because it puts a. It puts a framework around our choice of time management and our choice of what we're dedicating our time to. Right, how important are the things that you're focusing on after hours? How important are the things that you're focusing on during hours? And then, conversely, and most importantly, you're in parallel. How urgent are they? How urgent is it and how important is it for you to send that email at 9 30 at night? How urgent or how important is it that you attend that event? Right, it doesn't have to be negative. Right, it is important that you're visible. It is it, but is it urgent?
Speaker 2You need to. What what I'm hearing here is you need to set some parameters for yourself to show you talk just your example about emails. You know saying to yourself I am not going to respond to emails after 9 pm unless it is urgent.
Speaker 3Yeah, and is it even important to be checking them after 9 30 at night, like how important?
Speaker 2is it Cause they'll call otherwise if it's emergency or whatever it may be?
Speaker 3Exactly, if it's, if it's truly urgent, if it's truly a crisis, they're going to find you and then you have to do it. Yeah, but how much of that is self-imposed distraction which is not important, not urgent, Just things that we're consuming our time with right and stay busy, that you should be deleting essentially from your life, but instead we're adding yeah, it's, this is.
Speaker 2This really does get you thinking and I like the visual mark. You know going through this. So let's talk about quickly the um, the not important urgent and not important non-urgent.
Speaker 3So not important and not urgent, yep.
Speaker 2Okay, so okay, let's go there. Not important, the non urgent, not important. That puts us there with what we call distractions, correct, and what you had on there was a word, the word delete, delete. Yeah, so let's just, let's think about what's an example of a distraction.
Speaker 3Well, I would say a non urgent, non important distraction would be if you have a stick with email just to keep it essential, all right, that's perfect.
The Importance of Prioritizing Tasks
Speaker 3I turned off email notifications on my phone years ago, but let's say that I have email notifications still on my phone. Let's say that every time I work account gets an email, my phone buzzes, it flashes and it makes a sound. Okay, I know a lot of people that still have that. I'm not shaming you if you do, it's just not the way I choose to run my phone. Okay, let's say it's 930 at night, sick with the same example, and your phone buzzes, rings or sounds and flashes indicating that you have an email. Okay, so now I'm going to take out my phone, I'm going to open it up and it's a vendor generic email. Dear client, we'd like you to consider buying a subscription to this new magazine. Right, how important and urgent was it? Not at all.
Speaker 3Not at all Right, delete what did you say to yourself Well, was it even worth me looking at it? What did it distract me from and take me away from? What did it? What did it take me from? Nothing. That's why they call it distractions. These are the things that consume our time.
Speaker 3It reminds me sometimes in supervision when you talk to some of your staff and they say that they're overwhelmed or they're overworked, which is potentially a real issue that has to be solved. One of the first things that I see our HR team do in the various organizations that I've worked in is ask the person to track their time and to give an analysis over a two week period of how they're spending their day, in an effort to help their supervisor evaluate what tasks are actually being accomplished and tackled by these individuals, and in some cases you'll find that the employee is completely right the amount of work that's not a distraction or that's not an interruption, or that it's too overwhelming for one FTE. You need more people to do it, but oftentimes you find that the person is spending their day dealing with distractions or interruptions, and so maybe you need to change where they work, you change their accessibility, so that they can get to the real important work of planning and handling crises.
Speaker 2From a human services point of view, that's a total waste of human resources.
Speaker 3Even if you're running a for-profit company.
Speaker 2I think you want to maximize your profit, right? You definitely want to maximize that.
Speaker 3Yeah, and so I like this idea of people evaluating where they're spending their time and where they're putting their human resource if you will, their own human resource.
Speaker 2I wonder if it would be a good exercise to actually use this quadrant, go through and then actually mark each task that you do during the day and rate it with you know, identify which area of the quadrant it's in.
Speaker 3Yeah, just to pick on email a little bit more. One of the simple things that folks do is they have decided to turn off or to close the outlook or the Apple Mail, their email client on their desktop, and they'll say that from the hour of 9 to 10 o'clock I'll look at my email and from 3 to 4 o'clock I'll look at my email right. As opposed to it being on all day and having the notifications going off, and then you're becoming distracted and oftentimes you're finding things that you should just be deleting.
Speaker 2Right or you respond too quick. Sometimes it affects you this way. You respond too quickly where that person really should have found it out on their own and gone through the exercise and learned from it. Sometimes you're taking that learning experience away from them when you agree.
Speaker 3Totally. And if you just think about the precious time that you have on a work day or in your life, and if you were to start evaluating the amount of time that you have and the tasks that you choose to accomplish with that time, I bet we'd find that, ourselves included, we spend a lot of time in that not urgent, not important category, because some of us are seeking distractions from doing the important work of planning and setting goals, and when you're not able to plan or set goals, then you often find yourself dealing with crises.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I will take a self-fulfilling prophecy. So here's a question how many, how many people do you think out there, leaders? They may view what's really a not important urgent thing for an important urgent type of a task.
Speaker 3Yeah, and I guess if there's something that's urgent and important and you're treating it as non-important, or unimportant and non-urgent, the other way around.
Speaker 2Yeah, flip side.
Speaker 3Oh no, I thought that's what you're saying. But, if you've confused, if you've got the opposite end of the spectrum.
Speaker 2Oh, I see where you're going, yep.
Speaker 3If something is urgent and important and you're treating it as non-urgent, non-important, I would imagine there would be catastrophic consequences if you do that enough or if you do it at the wrong time. That's right If a trash can's on fire and you say oh, that's not important, that's not urgent, You're going to lose your whole house.
Speaker 3You're going to right yeah, to use the obvious example as opposed to oh my gosh, I don't have a fire extinguisher anywhere to put it up because I didn't do the important planning. You know, buying the fire extinguisher is not urgent, but it's important. You better decide when you're going to buy it so you have it, so that when the crisis arises, you have it.
Speaker 2I just bought a fire extinguisher. Yeah, it's important to have right? I was just thinking about it. I think it's like the, I don't know. I felt like a good father doing it, but you know, I just you start thinking about that, especially during the winter when your heat's going all the time.
Speaker 3Of course.
Speaker 2And you just never know in the kitchen that you could have a kitchen fire.
Speaker 3You know, I learned in a tip. Actually we had a fire safety. We were all fire extinguisher, fire extinguisher certified here. Put one in your bedroom so that if there's a fire in your house at night when you get out of your bed you have access to the fire extinguisher, as opposed to running through the fire to get it in the kitchen. Great point, you know, it was like it sounds so obvious. You know where I put it right In the kitchen, probably under the sink.
Speaker 2Under the sink.
Speaker 3Of course that's where everybody has it, but if the kitchen's on fire you might not be able to get to it.
Speaker 2And I actually got the easy one. It's just a spray, it's not a. You don't have to pull a key. They make them really easy now.
Speaker 3So, anyway, I thought that was a great tip. Put it next to your bed and that way you have it. If you need to fight the fire to get out of your house, you have it. You don't have to fight the fire, the extinguisher, to fight the fire.
Speaker 2It's these simple things in life. You just, you just probably saved me right there. I hope not.
Speaker 3My house burned down in 1986 to the ground.
Speaker 2You know what? You told me? That maybe, like a year ago, I had never known that prior.
Speaker 3Yeah, my parents were amazing through the whole process.
Speaker 1And if not, in that.
Speaker 3I don't have any trauma from it, I think because the way my family responded but literally lost the whole house.
Speaker 2So very talk about resiliency, Resiliency the community came together.
Speaker 3My parents were amazing. My older siblings were amazing. My grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, my neighbors, my friends, yeah where did you stay? We stayed with my grandparents for the first couple of weeks and then we went into like a rental town home, nice, and my mom drove me to school every day. It was a different district, but because we were quote homeless, we could go to my home school. How about that? And I took a long time for them to rebuild the house, but you?
Speaker 2just think of those things and like my God, my parents, they could have reacted. They could have reacted a whole different way.
Speaker 3Well, sure, and in the moment I'm in second grade, I had no idea what my parents were dealing with. I mean, I knew we lost our house, but I'm just a little kid, right Like. Only as an adult with children do I realize what stress that mother must have put on my parents. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2All right.
Speaker 3So that is the urgent, important matrix. Yes, it's paralleled with the Eisenhower matrix or the Eisenhower principle, and then overlaid on top of that, we put the do, delegate, delete or decide when to do matrix as well. So three leadership principles packaged into one. Again, we took the premise of the urgent, important matrix from the coachingtoolscompanycom, though this is a tried and true leadership framework that you can find anywhere.
Speaker 2And I gotta tell you as one of the takeaways here, you did very well with that 80s movie trivia. There. You only missed. What do you miss? Three Out of the fourth out of the 16.
Speaker 3Yeah, I missed three and I knew the movies but I definitely didn't get the quotes.
Speaker 2So you missed three out of 12. So it was you made nine out of 12.
Speaker 3I'll take it.
Speaker 2Nine out of 12, that's a good score.
Naming Albums and Giving Gifts
Speaker 3Out. Listen, I'll take it, and people would have thought the fix was in if I got all 12, right. Yeah, right. So Kudos to you for making some good movies. We gotta figure out. It's my turn to challenge you with something next. All right. Maybe I'll name an album and you name the band or something. That would be kind of cool. Yeah, cause I know what kind of music you like, so I would make it a little bit more difficult. I'm sure Though you know, in today's day, do you even know the names of albums?
Speaker 3anymore, it's tough. Oh and by the way, I have a gift for you. I wanna get a photo of us with me handing you this gift. Maybe we'll use that as the image for this podcast.
Speaker 2Okay, that sounds great. Hey, all right, let's go take a picture.
Speaker 3I wanna give this gift to you and we'll talk about it in the next episode. All right, let's wrap it up.
Speaker 2Okay, listeners, in the meantime, let's make it a great day and let's innovate the USA.
Speaker 3Sultry. Yeah, sultry, sultry. This sounds a great food, wow Woo.
