The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 398 - The Eisenhower Conundrum

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: I come to you today with something I really genuinely need your help and coaching on.

Pete: Yeah, as opposed to all the other things where you theoretically, hypothetically, don't actually need my help on.

Jen: Well, today I am bringing a problem to you that I have given a name. And what I am dealing with is what I'm going to call The Eisenhower Conundrum.

Pete: What? You and your ability to name things is world class. This is The Long and The Short Of It. The Eisenhower Phenomenon, did you say?

Jen: Conundrum. The Eisenhower Conundrum.

Pete: I mean, for us, this usually needs to get simplified to some sort of acronym. EC...E-C. It doesn't work. Alright, tell me. What does this mean?

Jen: So you, Peter, are already familiar with this. Listeners, some of you might be familiar with The Eisenhower Matrix, which is the urgent / important matrix, which essentially is a tool or a way of thinking that helps you create priorities for the things that you want to, need to, have to, could do in your life.

Pete: Yes. It's a classic two-by-two or four-box matrix. One end of the spectrum is urgent. The other end of that spectrum, the X-axis, might be not urgent. Then, if it's a Y-axis, it's the top end would be not important. And then, the other end would be important. And the idea is you map your to-do list (I think, from memory) into one of these four quadrants.

Jen: Right. And the goal is to be able to reduce things that are both not urgent and not important.

Pete: Yeah. We want to spend our time and energy on the actual things that are going to make an impact. That's my understanding of it.

Jen: Right, the things that are important.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Well, Pete, I've been working on implementing The Eisenhower Matrix, the urgent / important matrix, in my life for well over a decade now...maybe we're approaching two decades. And I've been very successful, I would say, at making sure that everything I bring into my life is important in some way, will have some sort of an impact on my life or the lives of the people who are in my life. And here's where the conundrum comes in. When you have, in fact, optimized your life and prioritized your life for the important, and life throws you a curveball, maybe you've got some slack. Life throws you two curveballs, three, or four, there's nothing left to cut. And I feel like I'm in this position right now where a lot of surprising curveballs...not negative. Like, they're all fine. But just things that were definitely not in my plan, that have created a lot of urgency and are very important and very significant, have all come around the same time. And I'm looking at my list of things I have to do, and I'm like, "Literally, none of this can be deleted." And that's the conundrum. I wish I had something on there like, "Stop scrolling," or like something that I could be like, "Oh, I know where I'm going to find not just the time but like the mental capacity to engage with this situation." And I'm like, "Woah. I have to tend to these things." And I can see that at the end of the tunnel is not light, but burnout. Like, wow. Good job, Jen, for eliminating all the not important things. But like, did I over-index?

Pete: Yeah. Okay, here's where my brain goes.

Jen: I can't wait to hear.

Pete: I feel like there's urgent, and then there's urgent. I feel like there's important, and then there's important. That I want to say, if we have a four-quadrant matrix and we want to spend time in urgent and important, I think there's another quadrant within that quadrant.

Jen: I never thought of this. I'm already loving it.

Pete: Like within urgent and important, within that box, what if there was another one? It's like Eisenhower Inception. What if there was another urgent and important matrix within that one? Because my brain thinks there must be some that are slightly more urgent than others. Like, one might have a deadline that...if I was a surgeon and there was someone on the operating table, like the urgent matter is to perform the surgery. And maybe there's an urgent matter that I need to do the same day, but it might be something that can wait until the afternoon, because I've got a patient in front of me. I need to do the surgery. Like, that's a really simple example. I'm not sure that's a great example. But all that to say, I feel like we can rank urgent in different ways. And I also think we can rank important in different ways. So how do we do that? The question that comes to my mind immediately, as I hear you describe this, is, "What's the cost of not doing these things?" That it's really easy to go, "I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this. This is urgent. This is urgent. This is urgent." And by the way, at the moment in the world we live in, everyone wants to convince you that everything is urgent. And I kind of call bullshit on a lot of it. I'm like, "I don't know how urgent this actually is. Is the world going to end if you don't get this proposal by Tuesday? I don't think so. I think you could probably wait until Wednesday." So, "What's the cost of not doing it," is the question that comes to my mind for you. If you look at your list of things and go, "What's the cost?" If the cost is, I don't know, "Someone in my family ends up in hospital because I failed to tend to their needs," well, damn, that's a pretty high priority right now. I'm going to do that. But if the cost of not doing it is, "Maybe I need to have an awkward conversation with someone and tell them I just need an extra week to extend a deadline," that's not a massive cost to pay, I don't think. That's my initial reaction. What do you think?

Jen: Oh, I just find that so fascinating. You know, sometimes when I'm working with clients and we're talking through, "Who's it for? What's it for," you know, they'll answer those questions. And I'll go, "But who is it actually for? And what's it actually for?" I can probably eliminate the not urgent / not important parts of the quadrant for myself right now, because those are not what I really need to deal with. And maybe I have urgent / actually urgent, important / actually important. Or maybe there's some sort of like, "On a scale of one to five, how urgent is this?" So I just want to offer up to the listeners, there's literally nothing to worry about. Like, there's no disasters happening. Nothing negative is happening. Just like unexpected things.

Pete: Yeah, I don't know why I keep using these dramatic medical examples. I don't know why. There's nothing going on.

Jen: But like, I have had a rule for myself, for many years, that I only take on one major project in a quarter. And I look at my year through a bird's eye view and I go like, "Oh, I already have a major project in August. That means I'm not going to take another major project that quarter." That's kind of how I keep myself in a place where I am mentally clear. And then, I just had all of these things that I would consider major projects get pushed into the next, let's call it, three months. And I'm like, "Woah." So yeah, I guess what I need to do is examine how actually important or actually urgent. But the other thing I haven't really done yet, which is what I would tell someone else to do, is investigate the resources that are necessary in order to bring that project to completion, and see if I can find some balance in what the outputs are going to be.

Pete: That's such a good point. I feel like the inverse of the question I asked is worth asking. So if one of the questions is, "What's the cost of not doing it," I think the other question is, "What's the cost of doing it? What is this going to cost me in resources, in time, in energy? How much is this actually going to cost me?" Because everything costs something. And can I get clear on that, so I can start to actually think about the impact of these? Two other questions that you sparked in me, just for whatever they're worth, which is, "Urgent for who? And important for who?" And I feel like...I'm definitely applying my own world and bias to this. Sometimes we think things are urgent, but actually what's happening is someone else has told you it's urgent for them, like an email that someone really needs you to respond to as soon as possible because their project is on the line. And I want to go, "Is it urgent for you, or is it urgent for them?" And if that helps us rank things or prioritize things better, then that's a good thing.

Jen: That was super helpful. Because in the last thirty seconds, I had an aha moment about one of these projects, where I'm like, "It is urgent for other people, but it is important for me. So, I actually need to slow down the decision making and the thought process around that. Because it impacts other people in the short-term, but for me, it has significant impact in the long-term. Okay. That was super helpful. Thank you.

Pete: I also wrote down that...gosh, I'm sure we've talked about this hundreds of episodes ago. But it feels like part of what's hard about the situation you're in is your usual rhythm or cadence or structure has changed or is threatening to change. Like you said, you like to take on one difficult project within a certain timeframe. And now, that's being disrupted, which I don't think is a bad thing. I think sometimes in life, there are moments where we sprint, and we've got a bunch of important stuff on, and we're just like, "Alright, for the next whatever week, two weeks, month, I have to buckle down and sprint to get these really important things done. Because I've done my little audit. I've asked myself these questions. And I've realized there's like three things I actually really need to get done, because they're really important and they are quite urgent." And it's okay to sprint, provided we also do what we know we need to do at the end of a sprint, in a literal sprint, but we fail to often do in a work sprint, which is recover. Have a moment of pause. Have a moment of recovery. Have a moment to catch your breath at the end of the sprint, so that you don't burn out, like you mentioned earlier. That it's okay for us to have a whole bunch more stuff in that one part of the quadrant, if it's in that one part of the quadrant for a short period of time.

Jen: Mmm-hmm. So you, once again, just completely changed my thinking in thirty seconds. Okay, sidebar: Pete, this is your gift. You change the way people see things so quickly. It is wild. This is the thing that drew me to you when we first met, is you would say like one sentence, and I'd be like, "My entire point of view has changed. My life, up until this point, was confusing. And now, everything is clear." Anyway, so thank you for that. Because I realize I said, "At the end of the tunnel is not light, there's burnout," but I could choose to say, "At the end of the tunnel, there's not light, there's recovery." And that is a mindset thing. If I predict burnout, guess where I'm headed?

Pete: Yeah, yeah. And we've talked about the way you structure your years and we recently did an episode on spring cleaning, so I know what time of year it is for you. But I also know what comes after spring, it's summer, and that's when Jen recovers. That's when Jen changes the way that she works, so that she can enable creative thoughts and different projects to bubble up. So there is some light at the end of that tunnel, some recovery.

Jen: And you know what, Pete? Summer is such a great incentive. And I'm so glad you brought it up, because I'll be damned if any of these things are going to take my summer from me. So yes, I will be sprinting for the rest of the spring. I think that's what I just landed on, is like, yeah, I'm going to be doing a lot of thinking. I might have some moments of mental exhaustion. And at the end of that, I get a beautiful summer, to recover from the sprint.

Pete: I love it. The other thing that comes to mind for me, just to share, is in signing up for a sprint, in focusing on the urgent and important part of the matrix, something's got to give. And this is an expression my wife and I say to each other all the time when we're entering a busy period of our work or our lives, that like something's got to give. And if we're using this example, the things that are going to give are the not urgent / not important things, or maybe even the important but not urgent things. So a super simple example might be, something that's really important to our family is we cook dinner and have dinner all together. It's not urgent, but it's important. And so, if I'm entering a sprint or Tracey is traveling for work and I'm traveling, and it's like a juggle, something's got to give. So, we're going to outsource dinner for the next couple of nights. And that's okay. So that is like one example of the ways that we can kind of meet ourselves where we're at when we're in a sprint, and go, "Well, something's got to give. Something's got to change. I've got to let some things go, so that I can focus on the sprint and the sprint alone."

Jen: I have a saying that I use, which is, "Cross that bridge before you come to it." And I see that reflected in, "Something's got to give." That you could decide ahead of time what's got to give, instead of having to make a game-day decision. So as I'm investigating the resources that I have to pour into these projects, as I'm investigating all the tasks and to do's and all the things associated with it, plus just my regular life, I can ask myself ahead of time, "If something's got to give, what's the something going to be?" So that I'm not stressed about it, when I get to that point.

Pete: Or mourning it. Or like, "But I used to work out every single morning at 6am." It's like, "Yeah, but that's the thing that had to give. Now, I do a twenty-minute workout at 7pm, because that's the thing that had to give. Because I've signed up for that upfront."

Jen: Mmm-hmm. Although, I'm not giving up the workouts. I love them too much. I love them too much.

Pete: It was just an example. Not a suggestion. I think that's a healthy thing to keep. A healthy thing to do.

Jen: Wow. I feel so much better.

Pete: Oh, really?

Jen: Yes. So much better.

Pete: Well, that was fun. I enjoyed mapping out the ol' Eisenhower Matrix. But then, the matrix within the matrix, The Eisenhower Conundrum. And how it's all well and good when things feel balanced, for us to go, "Oh, I have one thing in the important and urgent. Let me focus on that." But what happens when everything feels urgent and everything feels important? And can we pause to ask ourselves some questions like, "What's the cost of not doing this? What's the cost of doing this? What's really urgent? What's really important? Who is this urgent for? And who is this important for?"

Jen: Mmm. Wow. Thank you, Pete Shepherd. You're the best. And that is The Long and The Short Of It.