Imperfect #12: Overcoming Overwhelm
How the Eisenhower Matrix saves my day
As a perfectionist I suffer from analysis paralysis a lot. If you’re anything like me, read on. It’s another short post today.
Managers need to design and maintain systems through which teams can operate effectively with minimal input. Good systems make life easier by laying out solutions to frequent problems. How do we hire? How do we plan our work? Which principles guide our designs? Which programming languages do we pick for which jobs? Those are all problems that we encounter repeatedly. Repeatable answers to repeatable problems remove the need to solve everything from scratch every time.
Good managers run good systems. But every manager has to deal with interruptions. There’s always something that doesn’t fit a system and needs time. Maybe it’s research, maybe it’s thinking about staffing for a new team, maybe it’s a system design that escalated to you, there are always lots of things to do, all competing for time and attention. Everyone has a point after which they get overwhelmed, and for managers, that point gets a lot of traffic.
Systems like Get Things Done and to-do lists are great, but the single-dimension prioritisation of tasks misses most of the context and nuance of real life. At any given time, there are going to be things that urgently need to get done right now (or yesterday), and things that absolutely need to happen but in the future. Some things are very important, others don’t matter so much.
Urgent and important things probably require my close attention.
Not urgent and unimportant things might not need to get done at all.
In between those extremes, and somewhat off to the side of the vector they draw, are things that are urgent but not important, which make good delegation opportunities, and others which are important but not urgent so time must be found for them.
If this sounds like the 2x2 Eisenhower Matrix, that’s because that’s exactly what it is!
I don’t use it all the time, but whenever things feel like they’re going off the rails or I simply have too many competing priorities, I make sure to whip it up a Miro board with sticky notes, and keep it open in a browser tab. Whenever there’s an idle moment, like between meetings, I have a look at it and move things around to reflect any changes. Anything that’s on my urgent/important quadrant, I just refer to my notes to see whether I need to do something, or whether someone needs to be nudged.
Stickies in other quadrants are dealt with accordingly, although scheduling and delegation are more complex topics deserving of their own article.
That’s it, just a quick tip. For those who don’t have a self management system, maybe give it a try and let me know who it goes. If you have another system that works well for you in managing overwhelm, please shoot me a message, I’d love to know.
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!