This episode of ‘My Pocket Psych’ continues our series on productivity at work. After looking at what might stop us from making a start (Procrastination), we now discuss how we can decide what to do next.
The bottom line: if we don’t consider the importance and urgency of the work we do, we’ll end up simply working on the next thing that grabs our attention. And as we all know, this may not be the best use of our time and attention. We can simply end up responding to emails as they appear in our inbox, rather than turning our energy to something a lot more useful and important.
In this episode, we discuss one way of prioritising our work: the Eisenhower matrix. It’s a simple but effective tool for considering what you could or should be doing next. Everything on your to-do list should really fit within one of the four quadrants of this model, which can give you increased clarity when you review your workload.
Have a listen to the podcast, try it for yourself, and let us know how you get on. And here’s a blog post I wrote a few years back summarising the concept.
Next time on the podcast, we’ll look at how we can align our values, our roles and the work that we do – to give our experience of work more purpose.
