As a business owner, speed and effectiveness are essential in decision making to help grow your business. However, how do you organize the tasks that need to be completed? Do you constantly feel as if you’re stuck in a cycle of never-ending, urgent, yet ultimately unproductive tasks? In his recent video, Professor Paritosh Sharma discusses ‘The Urgent Important Matrix’ which can change the way you make choices in your business forever.
Defining The Urgent Important Matrix
Some businesses thrive and scale, while others are simply trying to keep their heads above water. More often than not, the distinction is in how decisions are made. Successful companies are ones that can make quick and decisive decisions and actions. Failing companies are the ones that end up taking too long and slowly lose market share as well as suffer overall performance decline.
Proffessor Sharma articulates that the best decisions are the ones that are taken swiftly, yet require considerable strategic thought. In essence, actions taken are able to reach the end consumers in the fastest way possible. This is how you scale a business sustainably without ever snowballing into obnoxious crises.
The Urgent Important Matrix is a useful tool to help business owners prioritize and delegate tasks. It places tasks into four categories:
- Urgent and Important
- Important but Not Urgent
- Urgent but Not Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
They key is figuring out which tasks should be done first. Let’s take a closer look at these categories.
This set of activities concentrates on critical aspects of your business that do not need immediate action
Important but Not Urgent.
Quadrant 1 is the quadrant where you place tasks that are key to the success of your venture but do not require immediate work to be done on them. These are the most challenging tasks to face since they seem deceptively easier than they truly are at first glance. Some examples include:
- Addressing challenges that could potentially arise in the future.
- Creating important connections.
- Planning for the future of the company.
Box tasks are those that need to be done before they become urgent. It’s always best to be proactive rather than reactive.
Extremely Urgent and Important
This is the most dangerous quadrant; it is also the most important one. This is the one that every entrepreneur must strive to stay away from. When tasks become both urgent and important, it means you are in a crisis mode or ‘firefighting mode’. For instance, always being on the cusp of a crisis, like not replacing your machinery until it breaks down is not a healthy outlook. At this stage, you are solving problems, or putting out fires, has peaking levels.
Tasks in this quadrant could include the following:
- Dealing with system malfunctions or system failures
- Resolving customer service issues or critical product repairs.
- To alleviate the negative effects of this quadrant, take action before the fires, or problems, build up. Making important decisions, figuring out work schedules, and sufficiently addressing critical problems before they escalate should be done proactively.
Not Urgent and Not Important
This quadrant captures distraction, such as tasks which are unimportant as well as not extremely pressing when it comes to boosting your business operations. Spending time here is a waste of precious resources. For all intents and purposes, petty office chat or taking part in meetings which do not focus on target achievement are detrimental.
Both solopreneurs and employees need to be aware not to indulge too freely into this quadrant because, ultimately, it leads to negative consequences.
Tasks That Seem Important, But Aren’t Really Important
As a manager, you need to be careful of tasks that seem or appear critical, but do not aid to the growth of your business. For instance, an employee might rush to respond an email that says urgent, but the content does not in any way aid their goals. A customer complaint can also be solved later as opposed to immediately responding to it.
Entrepreneurs should be aware that both their physical and mental resources are limited. As a result, you should make sure proper attention and energy is given to tasks that actually contribute towards your business goals.
How the Urgent vs Important Matrix Helps Your Business
In most businesses, whether large or small, there are barriers to growth. These barriers or blockades can stem from overly focusing on ‘urgent’ tasks and ignoring what actually matters. Not properly servicing your customers is another smart way to make your business stagnate. Focusing on the right things is the best if there is a decline that needs reversing or even improvement.
In order to avoid this, resuscitating your company from the brink of collapse requires taking measures when action items are still classified as important, not when they are classified as urgent. Using the Urgent Important Matrix, you can save your business from the depths of crisis management and save altering situations.
Realistic Steps For Business Owners: Using The Matrix for Decision Making
Train Employees: First of all, try and train your core team members on how to use the Urgent Important Matrix. After your management staff acquires this knowledge, they should be able to cascade it down to junior staff members.
Prioritize Using The Matrix:
Make sure that your team does not fall in the trap of what they “think” is the most focus area. It’s best to make them aware of the best ‘focus area’ quadrant so they do not have to waste time on urgency but non-importance tasks.
Fast Decisions Bring Quick Results:
In this day and age, decision making is one of the most powerful weapons and speed is an added competitive advantage. The sooner you tackle issues in the important quadrant, the better chances there are for businesses facing tough challenges. The critical part is to ensure that the urgent does not supersede.
Evaluate Your Choices:
Analyze your behavior and make sure that you do not get stuck in a cycle of decisions based on urgency and keyed importance. There should be indicators set into place so proactive strategies can be put in place for guaranteed growth.
Final Thoughts:
Productive Power Striving Down New Frontiers
Like we have already deliberated earlier, knowing how to run a business effectively means that you are familiar with the relations between the di/tri dimensional vectors believed to be urgency and importance. This means, to grow your business, you need to know when you should be acting and believing her strongest desires at the utmost priority and when to falter due to it creating a self-made crisis where you are forced to react and deal with too many facets at once.
Following the Urgent Important Matrix provides you the power to manage your destiny as an entrepreneur and eliminates unnecessary stress and ensures that your work is upto date with your long-term efforts. Always remember, the resuscitation and development of your firm is directly proportional to your ability to prioritize. Focusing on the correct aspects will guarantee sustained success for your firm and place it on the path of unlimited possibilities.
