Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #90| Overwhelmed by Urgent Tasks? Regain Control and Productivity with This Simple Tool

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#90| Overwhelmed by Urgent Tasks? Regain Control and Productivity with This Simple Tool · Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, michelle Gothier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hey friend, thanks for joining this quick hit Thursday.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Today I'm going to be answering a question that came in from a listener.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: I'm going to read the question now.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: It was such a good question.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: This is from Maggie.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: She asked how do I manage time for my longer-term, non-urgent but important projects while still handling the day-to-day urgent tasks?
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: I find it hard to make time for activities that would reduce long-term stress, like updating work protocols, creating self-help materials for my clients and organizing my pantry.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Thank you, maggie, for asking this important and great question that I think will not just help you but hopefully help everybody who's listening today, because they probably have their own version of this problem.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I love the way that you did a great job, identifying what was urgent and then other things that were important or high priority but just not as urgent.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: So here's what I'd recommend to solve this problem, I recommend using the urgency priority matrix.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Sometimes this is called the Eisenhower matrix as well, but here's what you want to do.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I'm going to assume that everyone is not sitting at their desk with a piece of paper in hand, so I'm going to put one of these in the show notes that you can download just a PDF of it.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: But for now I want you to imagine this as you're driving or whatever it is that you're doing while you're listening to this podcast.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: So imagine that you have a blank piece of paper and you draw a big old square on it, and then you draw a vertical line to divide the square in half vertically, and then you draw a horizontal line to divide the big square in half horizontally.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: So now you have four equal squares and that is your urgency priority matrix.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: On the top, you label the first two on the top, so the one on the left and the one on the right.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: The box on the left is urgent, the box on the right is not urgent.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And then in the left column, on the top box so the one that already is labeled urgent you do high priority and then the boxes below that are low priority.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: So essentially, what you have are four categories where your to-dos will fall into.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: What you have are four categories where your to-dos will fall into, and so, maggie, what I want you to think about is which of your tasks fall into each one of these quadrants.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I'm going to go through some examples so you can see what I mean.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: The first, the upper left quadrant, quadrant number one, is the one that we have labeled urgent and high priority.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: So an example of that would be like when you have your whole workday planned and then one of your kids is sick and you have to cancel all your meetings and take them to the doctor.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: That is an urgent and high priority to do For me.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: If, let's say, for example, I'm going to give a webinar and I have to put something together before it starts because it has a very specific start time, that would be in high priority and urgent for me.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Depending on the type of job you have, you might have deadlines, like you know, april 15th for taxes or something like that.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: So anything that is high priority and has a specific urgent deadline goes into quadrant number one.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Maggie, from what you've said, it sounds like you have a lot of things that are in that urgent and high priority.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Next, if we go over to the right, that's quadrant number two.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So we're still in the high priority row, but we've moved over to the not urgent box.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: This is a great place to put things that are more of a long term project so they don't have an urgent deadline, but yet they're still high priority and things that you want to get done.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: So what would go in here?
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: In Maggie's example, we're building resources for clients, organizing the pantry.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Other examples of this that you might feel in your life are like exercise setting up an exercise routine for yourself.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: For me, I'm working on creating a new program for next year to help people meet their goals.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: So it's not urgent that I get that done, but I want to do that.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: It's going to take a little bit of long-term planning.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Okay now, if we move to the third square, we have now gotten to our tasks that are of a lower priority but have a specific urgent deadline.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: So examples for these are certain emails you know those emails you don't need to respond to quickly they're kind of a low priority thing, but you need to do them or being pulled into other people's not urgent requests.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: You know when someone interrupts you and says, oh, I need your help on this, and they interrupt what you're doing and it's a low priority for you.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's a high priority for them.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Another example for something in this quadrant could be something that's more of a routine task, that doesn't necessarily require you to do it.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: So, for example, I write all of the emails that I send out to my subscribers, but after I write them, I send them to someone who sets them up in the email system and proofreads them.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And all of that for me, because for me that part of it is a low priority, but the timing is urgent, because they go out every week at the same time.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Then we have our category of not urgent and low priority.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: That might be something like scrolling social media.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: So for those types of tasks, those are usually the things that you can just eliminate from your task list.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: So back to Maggie's original question.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: The first thing that I would tell you to do, maggie, is to make sure that you have put all of your to-dos in the right box.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: So are the ones that you're saying are high priority and urgent?
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Is that actually true?
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Are they really high priority and urgent?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: I'm going to assume the answer is yes.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: On this, then write down all of your high priority but not urgent, and then here's where I feel like the magic can happen for you.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: So what I think you need to do is to schedule time to work on those box two not urgent high priority items, and there are a couple of ways that I would suggest doing that.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Schedule some specific time, and maybe that time is not like first thing on a Monday morning, if that's when you get a lot of calls from your clients, but maybe on a Thursday afternoon from three to four.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's a time where you could still be working on high priority urgent things.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: But you're going to set those aside and purposefully work on those box two not urgent high priority items.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: You could either choose one task to work on at that time for an hour or you could try to batch some of the tasks and just work on everything that's in that category for an hour or two.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Your pantry would be a great example of maybe you break it up and you work on one shelf for 15 minutes every Tuesday until it's done something like that.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: So while the urgent tasks are like, do this right now, these not urgent high priority tasks just need some planning.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, I hope that was helpful.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: As always, let me know if you guys have questions.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: I would love for you to write in and tell me what your question is so that I can answer it on the podcast.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: You do that by just clicking on text me or send us a text.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: I think is what it says in the show notes.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Tell me your name, tell me what your question is and I will answer your question here on Quick Hit Thursday.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Thanks, have a great day.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegothiercom.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: See you next week.