Your most important tasks can be determined through the Eisenhower Matrix, which is the easiest model I use in order to prioritize tasks.
It’s divvied into 4 categories
- Important & Urgent → put in the MIT
- Important & Not Urgent → schedule in the calendar to do
- Not Important & Urgent → give this task to someone else or delegate for later
- Not Important & Not Urgent → delete these
This helps us identify the essential and eliminate the rest. Why waste your time on things you’ve identified as not urgent and not important?
Another way to delegate tasks is to clearly define your goals. Figure out 3 goals for the month and attribute the importance and urgency of tasks to impact on these goals.
Things to keep in mind when creating these goals is be as specific as possible. Change “get abs” to do 15 minute ab workouts 3x a week. Change “eat healthy” to have greens with every meal. Change “put $400 into my savings” to pay your savings $100 a week for this month.
Goals become easier when they’re translated into measurable metrics like this. The clearer the goal, the harder it is to stray from it or argue the meaning of it to sabotage yourself from doing it. I know I’ve told myself time and time again to workout every day of the week. That’s a tall order for someone who wasn’t already doing that consistently. I had to break it down into such a small chunk that I had no other choice to do it. I could not argue with myself that I couldn’t do it. I told myself work out for 15 minutes a day. A run became the easiest workout to feel accomplished in the shortest amount of time. I couldn’t tell myself that it was too much of an inconvenience because you know, we know that we spend a lot more time scrolling on our phone in one sitting. So there’s this comparison and this choice: spend 10 minutes running and feeling great afterwards OR scroll through social media that you probably don’t even consume entirely? I think you know the answer.
You have the ability to turn large, daunting tasks and goals into small ones. You know why? Because every outcome is came to from a series of small steps. You have to go through these tiny steps in order to reach your goal.
Once you do these things, figuring out what you should prioritize and what you should let go of becomes easier.
