exactly how I prioritize my tasks

Summary

my week is split into two kinds of days.

1. focus days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. growth work only. no calls unless they directly drive revenue.

2. buffer days. Monday and Friday. admin, calls, the small fires.

every task that hits my plate gets sorted by my EA into focus or buffer first. then the focus tasks go through the Eisenhower decision matrix.

1. important and urgent. scheduled into the next focus block.

2. important and not urgent. scheduled later, but actually scheduled.

3. not important and urgent. delegated. that’s not my work.

4. not important and not urgent. deleted.

the whole system is designed so I’m not the one deciding what to do next on the fly. that decision is already made. I just show up to the block.

Transcript

introduction to the topic of productivity and task management

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do you know which task to focus on next?

This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I don’t think I’ve talked about this, which is unbelievable. If I if I did, I couldn’t remember that I did the podcast on it. But I was talking to someone on the team and they were asking about like my productivity system, how I prioritize tasks because they feel like they were getting, you know, super tight on not only things to do, but the actual prioritization of the things that they needed to do.

And it could be very hard. Like I could say, hey, if you have a goal. You should only be focusing on tasks that are in alignment with your goal and nothing else. But that’s not the reality for most people. Right. And it’s not even the reality for me. While I try to focus a majority of my time on things that are moving towards my goal, things pop up. Life pops up. Team members need help with things.

overview of focus and buffer days and their role in maintaining productivity

And so there are some things that you can do to be a little bit more productive and prioritize correctly. So here’s what I do. I’ve gone over the fact that I have focus days and buffer days. So my focus days are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. As of right now, focus days, I work on focus tasks, focus tasks or tasks that grow the business. Buffer days, Mondays and Fridays are just the tasks that, you know, I delegate emails, boring tasks, easy tasks, all those kind of things.

Those are the buffer tasks. And that’s how I break it up in my week. And so that’s a good productivity system. But to go one step further, I have like an inbox of tasks and I go in and label every task with my executive assistant, whether this is a focus or buffer task. And then that way he knows when to schedule them on my calendar. But then we go one step further and we use the Eisenhower decision matrix, the Eisenhower decision matrix.

And here’s how it works for me. The first thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to have something that is either important or not important. OK, so you when a task comes in, you have to decide, is it important or not important? And then the second thing you have to decide on is its urgency. Is it urgent, meaning it’s time sensitive or is it not urgent? Doesn’t necessarily matter when it gets done. So if we were to say something was important and urgent.

explanation of the Eisenhower decision matrix and its application

So if it’s important and urgent and it’s a focus task that goes into the critical category for me in scheduling that task. It’s important. It’s urgent. It is now critical. That’s the priority level. That means priority. It needs to get on my calendar and the next focus block I have available in this thing needs to get done. OK, if it’s important and not urgent, which there are plenty of tasks like that, like maybe you want to start a newsletter that’s important, but it doesn’t necessarily have to happen today or tomorrow.

It’s not time sensitive. It’s not urgent. Well, if it’s important and not urgent, you schedule it, schedule it somewhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s this week, next week, three weeks from now. Just get it on the calendar. If it’s going to take three hours, four hours. Wherever you have that block, if it’s a month from now, it doesn’t matter. Schedule that thing, put it on the calendar somewhere. So if it’s important, not urgent, schedule it. Now we move to the not important and urgent.

detailed breakdown of how to categorize tasks using the matrix

So if it is not important and urgent or time sensitive. So what could this be? This could be let’s say it’s an email, right? Maybe someone’s emailing you about a specific like administrative type question or, you know, they forgot the password to their login on your site and the forgot password button is not working. Well, I’m not saying that’s not important, but let’s just say it’s not important. It is important to help your customers, but it’s not important to the level of it’s you focusing on your goals.

And that’s kind of how I distinguish the two. But it is urgent. OK, so that’s where the priority level comes back in. It’s like this person needing to get access to your website is not important in the sense of moving the business forward. But it is urgent and time sensitive because that person needs help. They need help right now, today, whatever. And so that triggers on my calendar. Then the priority level is delegate. You delegate that thing.

discussion on the importance of delegation and task elimination

OK, so if it’s not important but urgent and time sensitive, who can do this? That’s not you. Who can do this? That’s not you. And that is one of the most important tasks right there. And then if we go to the last one, not important and not urgent. A little thing pops up on my priority level. It says delete question mark, meaning if this is not important and it’s not urgent, can we just delete it? Can we just get away with not doing it?

And this is where you get to have the fun part of actually saying no to things because you need to start saying no to some things. So if something pops up, it’s just really not that important. It’s not that urgent. It’s like, well, it’s not important. It’s not urgent. Maybe we could just get rid of it. And maybe you can’t. You kind of have to like, that’s why the priority level for me pops up. Delete question mark.

summary and final thoughts on enhancing productivity

It’s like, can we delete this? Maybe not. So it might go back to the delegate category or just schedule way down the line like it’s just not a factor. Or maybe you delete it. You just don’t do it at all and see if it comes back up. But that is how I actually work through my list. So if I have my task inbox and there’s 30 different tasks on there, just things I think of. I kind of do a brain dump.

And that’s really how I kind of work with my tasks. I’ll do like a brain dump or just something pops up all without my phone and put it on there. And then once a week we’ll go through and we’ll say, hey, is this a focus task or is this a buffer task? So focus moving the business forward. Buffer is like, hey, I can do this on the Monday, Friday, I don’t need to be doing focused work.

I don’t need that dialed in. It’s pretty simple. So we get to the buffer and then we get it to the importance level and then the urgency. Then we find out like, oh, OK, a lot of these can be delegated to someone on the team. My executive assistant could do this. I don’t necessarily have to do it. And it helps me to make these clear cut decisions on what I’m focusing my time on. So it’s really important to keep your prioritization level up there.

So hopefully you find that helpful. The implementation of the Eisenhower decision matrix into your workflow. Because I know that there’s a thousand things that you could do, would do, should do. And there are a lot of things that you just want to do, right? And so you have to put it on there. And if you can label it in all these areas and if you have a system, it goes pretty fast. You don’t have to spend a whole lot of time on this.

You can even just draw an actual four quadrant matrix. If you Google Eisenhower decision matrix and you have your to do list of 15 things, you can just put it in the different quadrants. And you can just do that on a piece of paper and decide where things and when things are getting done. So that is the Eisenhower decision matrix. That’s how to prioritize what you need to get done. And if you want to put a system in place like this, so you can be more productive and work on the most important things, well, you’re going to have to try harder.