The Urgent-Important Matrix (2013)

I've been recently coaching someone and reminding myself that lives and careers have different stages, and these stages require different strategies.

When you're on the younger side, a lot of your "win" comes from avoiding obvious mistakes. As in, "do homework" rather than "get high" or "pick a job where you will learn more" vs "coast."

As you grow successful, you are no longer picking between smart and dumb, options, but rather between two good ones. This is harder. You have to get good at saying NO to good opportunities and let real problems fester, so that you can focus on the even more important stuff. That's the mode in which you need the Eisenhower matrix approach - to force yourself to figure out what you will say YES to and thus what you will have to feel good saying NO to.

This is crushingly pertinent for my career at the moment. I've come from an organisation that I might describe as "architecture-led" into an organisation that is perhaps more "engineering-led". I prefer to plan and solve problems before they become crises. I don't know whether my boss like reacting to crises or we're just working through a really tough 12 months but we seem to _always_ be in a crisis. Problems are almost always solved in the "simplest" way - which makes a lot of sense from an engineering point of view - why do more than you need to? - but this often, and openly, means not actually solving the problem and just solving enough of it to shave off the spiky bits that are causing the "crisis".

There's very much a firefighting culture. That is, after all, how people earn medals. And whilst I've heard the adage that rewarding firefighting results in arsonists, I don't think it's quite that.

It's more than rewarding firefighting results in people who spot small fires but tolerate them to the point that other people notice - and then they don their helmet and rush in to fix it.

No one is maliciously lighting things on fire - but they won't put out the fires they find unless someone is watching.

I wonder why MBA’s never tried to call themselves Quadrant Engineers. Give them any two concepts and they’ll figure out exactly how to arrange them in quadrants and even concatenate descriptions to make a summary of each one.

(This goes in U-I/4, btw. You can ignore it if you need to.)

Recent and related:

A Magic Prioritization Trick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37818649 - Oct 2023 (42 comments)

REI-ification of things in 2s 3s 4s .. 7s. Humans and Crows (from the research) appear to like categorising things and have pretty clear affinities for sets which are bounded in the low digits.

4 goes to squares, 3 triangles, 2 halves is the false dichotomy. Few things are unitary.

We don't often do fives, or sixes but we do have the ISO 7 layer model.