Doing Everything is Impossible

Here’s how to focus on what’s important and actually get it done

Image by Donald Giannatti from Unsplash

In 1954 President Eisenhower cited the juxtaposition between importance and urgency in his famous quote, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent

Decades later, Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, created the Eisenhower Matrix based on this concept to help people categorize their tasks based on indicators of urgency and importance.

This matrix is used widely to help people organize their to-do lists and prioritize their time.

The problem with this model is that we shouldn’t be doing anything unimportant. If it isn’t important, then it shouldn’t be on your list at all. Putting things into a category of “delegate” can be helpful, but you’re not putting those things there because they’re unimportant; you’re putting them there because someone else can do them better, faster, or cheaper. They’re still important; they’re just not yours to do.

Our time as business owners (and humans) is extremely limited; the hard truth is that we can’t do everything…