A tale as old as time, never told to those in need.

The mis-training

Two important characteristics can be drawn from all the work we ought to do.

• Importance: The cost of not doing the work / The profit from doing the work
• Urgency: How soon should the work must be done after which doing it is useless

There should be a terminology for the messages being taught to us via behaviors instead of words. For example, if on surface you reprimand reckless driving but you don't enforce it well, and then you reward more deliveries done per day, you are effectively rewarding reckless driving. ( Also see Air Asia India's flaps 3 landing case )

From our childhood we are taught two implicit messages:

• All the tasks we have can be completed within the time we have ... if only we didn't "waste all our time". (Ever heard of the marbles-pebbles-sand-water story?)
• The task backed by the most loudly speaking "adult" is the most important thing to do.

Curse of the Eisenhower's matrix

Now comes the Eisenhower's matrix... which is an amazing tool, and a massive curse on our society.

So, what is it, and why is it a curse?

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	Do it	Schedule it
Not	Delegate it	Ignore it
important

Eisenhower's matrix is an amazing tool for dealing with too many things to do that realistically we cannot do them all.

Yes, this is the truth... we cannot do all the things in the universe. In fact, we cannot do most of the things. Which leads us to another truth:

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

This is one of the principles from The Agil\b\b\b\bManifesto for Agile Software Development.

So, how is it a curse?

Think about a 12 year old boy. He has to

• Prepare for his upcoming final exams
• Prepare for Spelling Bee that is going to happen tomorrow
• Prepare for inter-school GK quiz that is going to happen next week
• And continue his daily basketball practice.
• And still find time to play and socialize with his friends.
• And don't forget the Doremon episode this evening. And building with Lego, can't forget that.

Which of them are important? Which of them are urgent? But we do know that our 12 year old boy is certainly not thinking about any of this; he is having his decisions handed to him by his parents.

Fast forward and our boy just got hired by a large company. He faces two choices:

• Slack off and he doesn't get promoted next year.
• Try to do everything and he gets burnt out.

Can't do everything and have to burn your midnight oil? Oh that's totally because you watched IPL last evening and neglected my work, and totally not because your work is totally unrealistic, right?

Let's look at the Eisenhower's matrix again. Specifically, look at the bottom left quadrant.

	Urgent
Not	Delegate it
important

That is the one thing our boy cannot do.

And he is also a victim of delegation. Those at the higher rungs of corporate ladder do all the important things, while the not important things are dumped on the leaf nodes, completely buried in useless stuff.

Something different?

Maybe, just maybe, most of the stuff you are doing is not important.

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	Do it	Schedule it
Not	Ignore it	Ignore it
important

Our boy spent his life so far prioritizing the urgent things, but in reality he needs to ignore the urgency and the loudly barking "adults", and do things that are important to him. And maybe, the people who are nice to him, are more important than those loudly barking "adults".