In my recent comms, I’ve spoken about the importance for you as a business owner to focus on only doing what you can do, looking to delegate the rest and how to best manage your time.
A tool that helpfully combines all of these elements into one handy place is the ‘Eisenhower Matrix’ – the perfect method to work out what’s important and urgent, and to help you with what to do, what to delegate and what to delete!
Too many business owners spend time in the bottom-left quadrant – doing the £10-15 per hour tasks, or in some cases even lower than that (yes that includes doom-scrolling through LinkedIn / Twitter / You Tube for hours on end!).
The top-left quadrant is the zone of Demand – these are the things you have to do in order to drive your business forward immediately – such as submitting a proposal ahead of a deadline, dealing with a customer escalation or a staffing issue.
Both urgent and important and nobody else can do it but you.
However it’s the top-right quadrant where the magic happens – the zone of Direction.
This your ‘ON’ the business time, not doing all the operational day-to-day or routine jobs in the business.
This is where you spend time thinking, making strategic decisions, planning, working on hiring the right people to the right seats.
Developing strategic partnerships. Systemising your business end-to-end.
Working on your personal or professional development or blocking out time for exercise or networking.
It’s the time that, if you don’t diarise, gets deferred or de-prioritised because it’s not urgent. It’s why you end up in the top-left or bottom-left.
Which comes to the bottom-left – the zone of Delusion.
You delude yourself that you are busy – but you are busy doing employees’ work not owner’s work.
In 90% of cases it would be more cost-effective to get someone else to do this for you, or the task can be systemised.
This is where you get sucked in doing ‘employee’s work’ rather than leveraging your time by training-systemising-delegating.
It’s the interruptions, the ‘have you got a minute, boss?’, getting sidetracked from working in ‘flow’ on the important tasks in a concentrated way and solving every problem yourself.
Becoming a micro-manager of daily operational tasks.
The answer here is to look to delegate or defer the task and batch them up.
For example, limit your time to at emails to 20 mins, 3 times a day, not all day long and triage the urgent and/or important from the rest of the ‘noise’.
Or scheduling an hour in your day when staff can go through their issues, having thought through the options rather.
The bottom-right is obvious – the zone of Distraction.
Most social media, tuning into the 24 x7 negative news cycle, 80% of your email inbox. Be ruthless. Give yourself back precious hours and re-invest them in the top-right quadrant to leverage your time to make the greatest impact.
So here’s a job for today – take your current to-do list, and see how you can make it fit within these four quadrants.
Whatever ends up top-left – they’re your tasks for today! The top-right tasks you need to create a Default Diary and block chunks of time to ensure they get the focus.
Need some help with this? Schedule some time with me here.
While you’re here…
- Here’s a ‘must-watch’ video that relates to the above. [Takes 4 minutes to watch]
- See how this business went from 0 to $35 million in just 5 years with my help. [Takes just under 4 minutes to watch]
