You can’t manage time – but you can stop firefighting

‘Time management’ – the great paradox. Why? Because you cannot manage it. It just ticks and ticks. There is no managing time, there is only managing choices. Do I do this, or do I do that? A million times a day we make those choices.

One technique has been proven to achieve more success more than any other: ‘Eisenhower’s Matrix’. It was the US president Dwight D. Eisenhower who founded this simple model and was quoted as saying: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” You may also know it as the ‘Urgent and Important Matrix’. If you haven’t seen it before, give it a Google. My job here isn’t to explain the model – you can learn it quickly online. Instead, I’d like to focus on helping you to understand how to stop firefighting.

If you were to draw the matrix to reflect your time management, you’d draw a huge box one, and the other three boxes would be small. Box one is the urgent and important box – the firefighting box. This is the box with the most stress, and for some people it is the one they love most because it is the busy box. “I am soooo busy, I haven’t slept since 1982, and I’ve worked every day with no holidays too.” You know the type. In truth, they’re stuck in their email inbox, believing it’s the best use of their time. It’s not.

The challenge of the matrix is to take the red pill by accepting that ‘it’s easy to be busy, it is much harder to make a difference’. Making a difference is box two – important but not yet urgent. These are the tasks that make the real difference: having worked with people for 20-plus years on time management, the tasks in box two always turn out to be more important.

How do you get from box one to box two? Well, you don’t, really. Take these three steps:

1. Mindset: We believe time management is about tips, tricks, and hacks. It’s not – it’s about mindset. Accept that box one needs to be managed: get it under control. You manage it. Not the other way around.
2. Say no: Say no once per week to a supposed urgent and important task. You need to ‘train’ other people that just because their time management is poor, you do not accept the knock-on effect.
3. Focus: For one hour per week, set up a meeting with yourself and work on ‘box two’ tasks.