Sometimes a new piece of work will arrive and it’s not immediately obvious whether we should start it now or if it can wait. A quick triaging technique that I use is called the Eisenhower Matrix1, an approach I first learned from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple quadrant that is split across the groupings of urgent and important. Using this as a framework for discussions of incoming work can help make the choices more visible and therefore more explicit.
We ask two questions about this work.
- Is it urgent?
- Is it important?
If the work is urgent and we are feeling that immediate sense of urgency then we are more likely to respond to it from a place that Daniel Kahneman2 calls System 1. A key characteristic of System 1 is that answers are very fast, and often wrong. This is where snap judgements and cognitive bias live.
If we want to be able to correctly identify the importance of the new work then we need to be in System 2, which is slower, more methodical, and far more often correct.
So for this reason, it’s often better to ask about urgency first. If we recognize that the work is urgent right up front then we have a greater chance of overcoming our own biases and giving a correct assessment of the importance.
Once we’ve identified the urgency and importance then we can start to consider how we will effectively prioritize it.
- If work is both urgent and important then we should do it first. We may want to drop other things we’re working on or we may wait a short time, but we want to get to it very soon.
- If the work is important but not urgent then we should get to it next. Everything we focus on in agile will typically fall into this category. It’s almost never urgent but it is certainly important.
- Next up is work that is urgent but not important. What we really want to do here is delegate the work to someone else, ideally someone for whom this work is important. It’s not important for us and we shouldn’t be doing it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important for anyone.
- The last category is work that is not important and not urgent and the simple answer is that we just shouldn’t do it all all. You may think that this last grouping is ridiculous and that nobody would ever do anything that is neither important nor urgent and yet when you start seriously looking at all the things you do on a daily basis, you’ll find these everywhere. They fill our time and make us far less effective than we should be.
What we tend to find in most companies is that we prioritize things that are urgent, whether or not they are important. What we should be doing is prioritizing work that is important, whether or not it is urgent.
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Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed the ideas behind this tool, and used them extensively in his work with the military and later in his role as president. ↩
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Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes about Systems 1 and 2 in his book Thinking Fast and Slow ↩