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
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 2:Hello there Dr Mark Hoffman.
Speaker 3:Howdy, howdy how.
Speaker 1:Howdy, how. Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 2:Oh, 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 3:Actually, no, it's a full seven, because I definitely didn't recognize that line, but I knew the movie at least.
Speaker 2:You're going to be walking around this office proud as a peacock.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to say through that door, you're not. I know my head won't fit through the door.
Speaker 2:Well, you almost bump your head when you go through doorway.
Speaker 3:It is true, I definitely have smashed my forehead quite a bit.
Speaker 2:You 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 3:The maniac was our mailman. So I'm thinking Funny Farm, right Dude, that's it.
Speaker 2:Is it really? Yeah, that's Funny Farm.
Speaker 3:I love you trying to get that, yeah, he would go through.
Speaker 2:And he goes. Who was that? That maniac was our mailman. It was the wife.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 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 2:Yeah, 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 3:The last apple. He's got the new record for lamb fries.
Speaker 2:A new world record.
Speaker 3:All right, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Okay, 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 3:I'm telling you, yes, you've got it, you've got it yeah.
Speaker 2:Go 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 3:I 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 2:Yeah, it's the hairline, maybe, I don't know, looking good. Yeah, thank you, I mean.
Speaker 3:I 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 2:Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3:We'll exchange birthday. I think it's what we're doing. I'm January 28th.
Speaker 2:Can 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 2:It 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 3:That's heavy.
Speaker 2:So I met, you know it was a big deal.
Speaker 3:We were all watching it.
Speaker 2:It was. It was a tough one because especially because there was a teacher there.
Speaker 3:Chris McCullough and we were all watching it. Yeah, it was a big deal. Teacher in space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really was. It really was, but that's, you'll never forget my birthday now.
Speaker 3:We will never forget, yeah, my birthday May 8th.
Speaker 2:I didn't mean to mean to bring us down there, but that's what happened.
Speaker 3:See, I told you when's my birthday.
Speaker 2:You 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 3:Cinco de Mayo.
Speaker 2:I had. That's how I remember things.
Speaker 3:Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day.
Speaker 2:What is it?
Speaker 3:Everyone 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 2:Oh.
Speaker 3:So there you go. But everybody thinks it's, it's not their fourth of July All right, let's keep going.
Speaker 2:Okay, things that make you go, hmm, all right. So look up here, look up here, look up here.
Speaker 3:Look 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 2:I'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 3:Oh, is this the three amigos? It's the three amigos. Oh my God.
Speaker 2:That's where they're breaking in, in the very beginning El guapo, el guapo.
Speaker 3:Blue shadows.
Speaker 2:Oh my little buttercup has a sweetest smile.
Speaker 3:I know the movie. I did not get that quote Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, 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 3:Back off, man, I'm a scientist. Back off, it's not the fly, is it?
Speaker 2:It's not the fly, I don't know Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Give me more hints, hints. That's a loss.
Speaker 2:OK, 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 3:Oh, Ghostbusters yeah.
Speaker 2:There 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 3:I just missed the quotes, but I know the names.
Speaker 2:Dr Peter Venkman, aka Bill Murray. Bill Murray, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Phenomenal, phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Murray, great humor.
Speaker 3:I'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 1:I didn't recognize it. It wasn't small wonder.
Speaker 2:She's a small wonder.
Speaker 1:That song haunts me now because everybody's showing me what it is, of course.
Speaker 2:Hey Coons, check out this theme song.
Speaker 3:I 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 2:Yeah, you're welcome, you're welcome.
Speaker 3:And so I missed the.
Speaker 2:The pleasure was all yours, sure was all mine.
Speaker 3:Let'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 3:And 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 1:Okay, All right, so you can Google this thing.
Speaker 3:If 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 2:Correct.
Speaker 3:Right. 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 2:So 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 3:And those are the urgent issues that are important.
Speaker 2:Urgent 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 3:Yeah, 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 3:He'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 2:So 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 3:But is it an urgent matter to do the drill or is that under the goals and planning of important but not urgent?
Speaker 2:So I see it almost in the middle.
Speaker 3:Yeah 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 2:Yes, planning the drill is important, but not urgent and that would go over in the goals and planning side.
Speaker 3:Exactly so our team had it planned.
Speaker 2:They were ready to go.
Speaker 3:They 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 3:Because 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 2:Yep 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 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The planning that's involved setting goals, progress monitoring, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 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 2:I like it.
Speaker 3:So 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 2:No no.
Speaker 3:And 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 3:And 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 2:So 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 3:Blackberry Pager Pager. I had a Pager yeah.
Speaker 2:So 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 3:Right, 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 2:You 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 3:Yeah, and is it even important to be checking them after 9 30 at night, like how important?
Speaker 2:is it Cause they'll call otherwise if it's emergency or whatever it may be?
Speaker 3:Exactly, 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 2:This 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 3:So not important and not urgent, yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, 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 3:Well, 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.
Speaker 3:I 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 3:Not 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 3:It 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 2:From a human services point of view, that's a total waste of human resources.
Speaker 3:Even if you're running a for-profit company.
Speaker 2:I think you want to maximize your profit, right? You definitely want to maximize that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 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 2:I 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 3:Yeah, 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 2:Right 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 3:Totally. 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 2:Yeah, 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 3:Yeah, 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 2:Yeah, flip side.
Speaker 3:Oh 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 2:Oh, I see where you're going, yep.
Speaker 3:If 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 3:You'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 2:I 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 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:And you just never know in the kitchen that you could have a kitchen fire.
Speaker 3:You 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 2:Under the sink.
Speaker 3:Of course that's where everybody has it, but if the kitchen's on fire you might not be able to get to it.
Speaker 2:And 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 3:So, 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 2:It's these simple things in life. You just, you just probably saved me right there. I hope not.
Speaker 3:My house burned down in 1986 to the ground.
Speaker 2:You know what? You told me? That maybe, like a year ago, I had never known that prior.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my parents were amazing through the whole process.
Speaker 1:And if not, in that.
Speaker 3:I don't have any trauma from it, I think because the way my family responded but literally lost the whole house.
Speaker 2:So very talk about resiliency, Resiliency the community came together.
Speaker 3:My 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 2:just think of those things and like my God, my parents, they could have reacted. They could have reacted a whole different way.
Speaker 3:Well, 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 2:All right.
Speaker 3:So 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 2:And 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 3:Yeah, I missed three and I knew the movies but I definitely didn't get the quotes.
Speaker 2:So you missed three out of 12. So it was you made nine out of 12.
Speaker 3:I'll take it.
Speaker 2:Nine out of 12, that's a good score.
Speaker 3:Out. 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 3:anymore, 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 2:Okay, that sounds great. Hey, all right, let's go take a picture.
Speaker 3:I wanna give this gift to you and we'll talk about it in the next episode. All right, let's wrap it up.
Speaker 2:Okay, listeners, in the meantime, let's make it a great day and let's innovate the USA.
Speaker 3:Sultry. Yeah, sultry, sultry. This sounds a great food, wow Woo.
