Mental Models #5: How To Prioritize Time & Tasks To Enhance Your Work (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. So we're doing things a little bit differently this week. We dropped our third-ever mini-series, which means you got two episodes Monday, two episodes, Wednesday, and two episodes today. You're listening to the fifth episode in the series of Founder’s Journal classic, and be sure to check out today's second episode on the power of leverage, as well as both of Monday and Wednesdays episodes. This week's theme is Mental Models.

We're going to talk about some of the most powerful tools you can use to sharpen your thinking, prioritizing, and decision-making. Many of these tools have been made famous by leaders like Elon Musk and Dwight Eisenhower. And in today's classic episode originally published on August 16th, 2021, I talk about How To Prioritize. Let's hop into it. 

 I have this weird thing where I love studying great workers. Just yesterday, I was reading this article by First Round Capital about the CEO of Levels who tracked how he spent his time for the first two years of building his business, and I found it fascinating how he thought about allocating his time across a week.

Maybe it's because I have my own insecurities about the way in which I work, or maybe it's because I realize how time truly is our scarcest resource and I have an appreciation for other people's abilities to maximize the value of their time. But what always impresses me most about them is their ability to juggle a dozen things gracefully while pushing forward the most important projects in a high quality way. So I'm going to be honest with you, I got selfish to this episode. I wanted to better understand how the best workers prioritize their work so effectively in hopes that I could become a better prioritizer myself. This led me down a rabbit hole of a dozen conversations with professionals of all backgrounds, all seniorities who gave me a dozen different prioritization strategies.

I'm going to take you through a few of my favorite strategies so that you can pick one that works best for you. But here was my highest level takeaway: all that prioritization is, is a process by which you give attention to the highest leverage tasks that drive the highest value for your business. These strategies are a means to an end, and it's all about finding one that maximizes your ability to prioritize. So without further ado, here are four prioritization strategies that you can test and add to your professional toolkit. 

Strategy #1: Eisenhower Matrix

The first one is called the Eisenhower Matrix or Eisenhower Box. This simple strategy was developed by former president Dwight Eisenhower, who is known for being highly productive during his two terms as president. And the strategy goes as follows. What I want you to do is draw out a two by two box. And at the top of the two by two, you're going to write two words. You're going to write urgent on the top left and not urgent on the top right. And then on the left side of the two by two, you're going to write two more words. At the top, you're going to write important, and at the bottom, you're going to write not important. And so basically what this leaves you with is four boxes that are organized by some level of importance and urgency.

Top left, I have the urgent and important box. And the mental shortcut that I use for this box is these are the things that you must do urgent and important tasks include things like meetings and deliverables, whether it's your all team all hands or you sending a daily report to your team, or me recording this Founder's Journal episode. Urgent and important are things that must get done or you're just not doing your job effectively, but if they fill up a hundred percent of your time, you're in trouble, and that's because neglecting the top right box is not possible if you want to be a top performer.

The top right box is not urgent and important. So if the mental model for urgent and important is doing the task now, the mental shortcut for not urgent and important is deciding when you're going to do the task. It's something that must get done, but not necessarily this second. I believe this is the box where so many professionals get stuck, and it's the one that only gets more important as you get more senior. Not urgent and important tasks are oftentimes the most important tasks in the business, and they oftentimes take the form of long-term deliverables that require these intermediate steps and proactivity to pull off effectively.

And so for a senior professional or a manager, a not urgent and important tasks could look like creating a hiring roadmap or a one-year product planning doc for the business. If you're more junior not urgent and important tasks could look like a presentation you're helping your boss put together or prep for a client pitch that you have coming up in a few days. This box is all about foresight and it's about not letting urgent and important tasks, the top left box, where you need to be more reactive, take over your entire day. These first two boxes are your sweet spot. If you can allocate more than 75% of your working time to these boxes, you're doing something right.

Now, the third box in the Eisenhower Matrix, which is bottom left, is urgent and not important. This box is all of your reactive, low level, low leverage tasks: answering mindless emails, scheduling meetings, creating social posts. The mental model that I use for this box is delegation. These are tasks that must get done, but ideally they don't need to get done by you. Whether it's delegating these tasks to an intern, an executive assistant, a freelancer, or a more junior employee, this box can become an even more destructive time-suck than urgent and important because it must get done now, but it can keep you and the business running in place if you don't have it under control.

And that leads me to the final box. This box is no man's land for all of us. The bottom right of Eisenhower's Matrix is both not urgent and not important. Anything in this box should be eliminated most of the time activities in this box, neither need to get done now, nor are they important to get done at all. These are the activities where your return on time spent is abysmal because they take time, but there's no reason to be spending time on them. In practice, this looks like you doing something outside of your job description for your business, even though it's not a priority for the business ,or things in your personal life that make you feel worse after doing them, whether that's junk food, social media, or watching The Bachelorette—guilty on that one.

So just to summarize Eisenhower's Matrix, there are four types of activities: urgent and important, which you do now, not urgent and important, which you schedule to do later, urgent and not important, which you delegate to other people, and not urgent and not important, which you delete. That's the Eisenhower matrix. And it is the first prioritization strategy used by so many high-performing professionals. 

Strategy #3: HFEL

Next up is H F E L. This stands for a hard first easy. Last. We all have this tendency. When we work to do a lot of small things on our to-do list when we start the workday because it feels good and we feel productive because we get to cross things off of our to-do list that is endlessly long.

The problem is if we use items crossed off of a to-do list as our barometer for doing good work, we will always bias towards doing more effort than being more effective. The best way to nip this habit in the bud is to do the most challenging most high value activities first, when you start your day, and force yourself to be uncomfortable, but effective from the get-go. By the way, this is something I am notoriously bad at. My default setting is to work on small, easily accomplishable things, to feel productive, things like email, coffee-chats, researching for a podcast episode. They feel good when I complete them, but they don't actually push things forward all that much. So that's H F E L. Hard first easy last, the second prioritization strategy that you can use in your daily workflow.

Core vs. Non-Core

 Next up is core versus non-core, and this next framework is actually one that I wasn't familiar with before, but it is used by one of our senior leaders at Morning Brew. I call it core versus non-core, but you can also call it business as usual versus shiny objects. This framework is all about staying focused on the core products, processes, and priorities of the business to ensure that you don't neglect those things, because you're too busy chasing the new shiny opportunity that's put in front of you.

With this framework, you organize all of your tasks into one of these two buckets: business as usual or shiny objects. And the goal is to first prioritize the business as usual tasks, because these are the things that drive the business today. They may not be the sexiest, they may not be the most exciting, but they are the most critical things to keep the machines spinning at the present. Once the business as usual stuff is done, then you can let yourself work on new initiatives and new projects that may have a lot of potential, but haven't been proven out one way or another. So how this senior leader who I mentioned describes it is he first focuses on things like 2022 planning for our core products that already exist that Morning Brew, and then once he's done with that, and he feels confident about the business as usual activities, he focuses on new initiatives, like new industry newsletters or new products to launch like job boards for our audience.

That is core versus non-core or business as usual versus shiny objects. 

Strategy #4: Sunday Sessions

Now the final productivity strategy is something I call Sunday Sessions. This was a popular productivity framework that many folks mentioned to me on Twitter and several entrepreneurs that I know make use of. The whole goal is to set your priorities over the weekend so that when Monday comes around, you can hit the ground running. On Sunday, you dedicate one or two hours to review your upcoming calendar and priorities, and you should accomplish three things in your Sunday session. First, you should get ruthless about your upcoming weeks meetings and try to prune, or get rid of, 20% of those meetings.

As I've said, in my past Founder's Journal episode about meetings, meetings should be a last resort and only should happen if consensus needs to be reached as a group. If you can't get out of meetings because you're junior or because you've been asked to be a participant, but you find that they're not a good use of your time, I'd empower you to take control of your situation and share those feelings in an appropriate way with someone who does have control over the meeting where this is the case. So that's the first step clearing out meetings that aren't a good use of your time. 

The second step is writing down your top three priorities for the week. These are the things that must get done, and if they don't, you feel like your week was not time well spent.  Write those three things down on post-its and put them on your desk so you have a constant reminder of the most important must-complete tasks for the coming week.

 Now, once that step is done and you've reviewed and pruned some of your meetings, the final step is to create hour plus long chunks of time in your calendar that you reserve for your top three priorities. What that allows you to do is going into your week, you know, that you'll have the right environment to power through the most important that you need to be working on.

TL;DR 

And those are four of probably 400 different productivity strategies: the Eisenhower Matrix, H F E L, hard first, easy last, core versus non-core, and Sunday Sessions. Just remember these strategies aren't the crystal key to being a great worker. Being a great worker involves so many other things like the right skills, the right environment, the right level of focus. But these productivity strategies can be a tool in your toolbelt, a means to an end to be a smarter, more effective worker. And finally, my purpose for walking you through four of these strategies is not for you to adopt all four, but rather it is for you to try each of them on for size for a week and get a sense of what works best for you and how you work so that you can settle on the strategy that makes the most meaningful impact on your impact to the business. Now, I'd love to hear from you, if you have a strategy for prioritizing your way of working that I haven't talked about, but you find it to be extremely helpful.

I Want to Hear From You

Shoot me a message. In an upcoming episode, I would love to share my favorite one with listeners so that the community can benefit from your framework that wasn't discussed. Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any thoughts or questions at all. Thanks so much for listening to Founder's Journal. And if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.