Maximizing your time and energy as a leader is often painful.

With the barrage of messages coming your way over email, voicemail, collaboration platforms, and internal social media channels, time management is an unmanageable situation.

Add to it the demands on your team for immediate solutions to emergent problems while balancing the delivery on important goals.

It’s enough to leave you, as a leader, feeling frustrated, ineffective, and exhausted.

Lately, in my work coaching leaders, I resurrected an old warhorse known as the Eisenhower Matrix to help with the concept of prioritization. But since today’s world looks very different than Eisenhower’s, I shifted the model into what I’m now calling the 4 I’s Matrix.

Eisenhower’s Matrix was Revolutionary for Decades

Back in the time after World War II, corporations and leaders were experiencing massive growth in business.

They were taxed with navigating the demands of new products, corporate structures, and new processes. Industrialization was taking a toll on leaders and workers alike.

During his time as leader of the NATO forces, Eisenhower created a prioritization matrix that helped him to categorize his tasks (and consequently his time) by urgency and importance.

The matrix helped him to decide what to do as a result of a task’s categorization. His matrix looked like this.

After Eisenhower became president in 1953, his matrix proliferated into the new world of mass production in the United States.

The matrix enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s through the work of Stephen Covey and his highly successful book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

This World Is Not the Same as That One

With all due respect to former President Eisenhower (and to Stephen Covey), the world we manage today is not even close to the world of the 1950s–1990s.

Back then, the primary communication channels in companies were the memo, the meeting, and the phone call.

Now we are communicating about work through multiple channels including, email, phone calls, meetings, internal chat, collaboration platforms, texts, and video.

Back then, corporate strategic plans were created for the 5–10-year timeframe. Now, corporate strategies may be relevant for 6–18 months.

Back then, importance and urgency were the main factors in deciding how to prioritize. Now, we have to create solutions for issues that are not only urgent but immediate.

The 4 I’s Framework Helps to Respond to Immediate Needs

Adding immediacy as a criterion to help categorize and prioritize your work, time, and attention, allows you to arrive at the 4 I’s Framework. The 4 I’s Framework looks like this:

The 4 I’s presents a way to leverage your time, energy, and focus using these 4 categories: Important, Immediate, Interesting, and Insignificant.

In addition, it adds a fifth category where both Immediacy and Importance are driving the business need.

Following are some tips to help you use the matrix and respond accordingly.

Important

If a task or project is Important, that means it is tied to your goals, the goals of your team, and the company.

Given their alignment with key success measures, items in this category should be on your calendar, or in your regular conversations.

When working with clients trying to determine what to do with these types of tasks and projects, your conversations center around level of involvement.

Clients usually decide that it’s helpful to be in the initial conversations and planning for these, and then receive regular updates on status, roadblocks, or issues and risks to success.

Important items are usually tied to the strategic plan for the company and the time horizon for these would be longer term, anywhere from one year to three years.

Immediate

When items are in the Immediate category there is both high importance and urgency.

Given the parameter of Importance, as a leader, you should have some involvement in the task or solution, at least at the start.

However, when a team receives a request for an immediate solution, generally the team has a built-in level of trust and subject matter expertise. Some questions leaders may want to think about in immediate task cases are:

“How might I delegate the work to the people on my team that have the day-to-day expertise in this area?”

“How might we spin up a sub-team or swat-team to handle this immediate need, while the rest of the team continues to focus on delivering on our goals?”

“How do I need to be updated, and what level of reporting am I responsible for?”

Items in the Immediate category are usually triggered by a business incident that didn’t go well, a safety or customer service issue, or some regulatory body that needs the company to respond to a violation.

The time horizon for these types of issues is usually a period of weeks to three months.

Immediate and Important

Tasks and projects in this category are generally considered a “fire drill,” or “all-hands-on-deck” affair, and a leader may be expected to be involved in executive updates or daily status reporting.

For an idea about Immediate and Important items, think about events like system downtimes, production interruptions, natural disasters, or responding to environmental issues like COVID-19.

Responding to these types of critical issues really demands that a leader clear the decks, deprioritizing most other Important-only and Immediate-only issues.

The leader should employ a “surveil and delegate” mentality. Surveil the Important items that the team is managing, and delegate completely any other items in the Immediate category.

Questions to consider in these situations are:

“Which meetings or calls are critical for me to be involved in?”

“What is the cadence of team updates that needs to be established?”

“What resources do we need to be successful?”

The timeline for issues that are both Immediate and Important is usually 24-hours to one week.

Interesting

Oddly enough, this is the category that presents the biggest challenge for leaders. They’re fairly adept at managing or responding to items that are Important and/or Immediate.

Where they sometimes get stymied, is in their ongoing focus on things that are Interesting.

Matters in this category might be:

Emails where the leader is copied, and the information or question is not directed at them.
Meetings the leader is invited to, where they are not accountable or responsible for the goal but are simply being informed.
Interactions between teams or team members that should be solved at a lower level, but someone is escalating the leader into the conflict.

Interesting (only) matters tend to resolve themselves over time.

Think about when you have been out of office on vacation--when you return, your inbox is piled with 100-150 emails or more.

If you follow the email threads from the oldest to the most recent, you generally find that the issues in the emails you are copied on get solved by others who are closer to the work.

As items that you suspect are “Interesting” show up in your inbox, perhaps resist responding to see if the item resolves itself.

If an Interesting meeting shows up on your calendar, consider asking for an agenda prior to the meeting to evaluate how critical it is for you to attend. Perhaps you can receive a summary afterward instead.

Insignificant

This is another category where leaders can spend unnecessary time reading emails or answering voicemails or invitations.

Insignificant items are those that when you receive them might cause you to want to roll your eyes or feel annoyed.

Think about those items in your inbox that request meetings with vendors, industry experts, or industry publications.

Be intentional with these types of requests, and if they are not connected with your personal or professional goals, the delete button is a perfect solution...As is the unsubscribe link if it’s an email from a list you subscribed to.

This category may also include requests for interviews, mentorships, or presentations for schools or trade groups.

Perhaps some of these items are not insignificant to a leader committed to industry networking, developing young professionals, or to developing school-age students into future company employees.

However, it’s critical to segregate responding to these types of requests or focusing on the articles or webinars to times that are specifically designated for this purpose.

If possible, set aside some time, once per week to respond to these items. Otherwise, they become a distraction to the matters that really need your attention.

Which One of the 4 I’s Trip You Up?

If you’re at an inflection point with managing your time and energy, it’s worth expending some of your mental bandwidth to figure out which “I” is causing you the most grief.

Since the hybrid workplace model now dominates how teams work today, I’ve noticed leaders want support to help them use their time and energy more effectively. I partner with leaders to help them do just that.
Schedule a free consultation session with me to see if I can help you beat overload with my 4 I’s Framework.

This 4 “I’s” Framework Helps Leaders Beat Overload