There have been a total of seven US presidents over the course of my lifetime.
That should probably give you a pretty good guess as to how old I am.
And to get to this level of leadership, or even just to be considered the US president, you need to know a thing or two about how to get things done.
Whether that's from a personal productivity standpoint or just from the ability to motivate others to get things done.
Now, arguably, my favorite US president of all time was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And that may sound surprising because he was the leader of the United States long before I was even born.
But this quote has really stuck with me since the first time I heard it.
He said, "What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important."
And from this brief quote, we get our important-urgent matrix, something that was made quite popular by Stephen R. Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Now, the important matrix gives us four different quadrants where we can group together our tasks and our projects and give us a bit of a better idea of where we should be focusing our attention and what types of tasks or what types of things we should maybe try to avoid on a daily basis.
We first have our important and urgent quadrant.
Now, this tends to be our reactive tasks, things that have a sharp deadline, something that's due right away, a crisis, some type of fire that we need to fight.
Next, we have our important and not urgent quadrant.
This tends to be more of our proactive activities, things that don't need to be accomplished today, this week, or maybe actually never need to be accomplished, but provide a lot of value if we work on them and if we bring them to fruition.
Down below, we have our tasks which are not important yet urgent.
And these tend to be made up of a lot of interruptions.
Think of phone calls that you receive or people who drop by your desk.
And perhaps what they have in front of you is not that important, but it may seem urgent, or people are making it sound more urgent than it actually needs to be.
And then our last quadrant are our activities which are neither important nor urgent.
And these tend to be our time wasters.
Now, we all need some downtime, we all need to get away, maybe spend some time binge-watching Netflix.
But hopefully, during our working hours, when we're trying to get things done, we're spending little to no time in that last quadrant.
And what President Eisenhower was trying to get us to focus on was that we should be spending most of our time in the important and not urgent quadrant.
This is where we can be proactive, and as a result, we have an opportunity to minimize the number of things that fall into that reactive quadrant, that important and urgent quadrant.
Now, another president which I think had a lot of valuable productivity advice for you and me was our most recent sitting president, President Barack Obama.
And you're probably wondering why I'm showing so many pictures of President Obama on the screen here.
Well, do you notice anything different between these images, or maybe I should say do you notice anything similar?
Yes, Barack Obama was known to wear only two different suits: one grey suit, as you see here on the left, and then one navy blue suit here on the right.
He had the exact same cut, the exact same style for both suits, but just two different colors to choose from.
No, no, I'm not suggesting that he only had physically two different suits.
He had multiple copies of each suit, but only two colors: one grey and one blue.
So why was this helpful to him?
How did this help him improve his productivity and his ability to get things done?
Well, when he was asked the question, he responded with this: he said, "I'm trying to pare down my decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm wearing because I have too many other decisions to make."
You see, the concept that President Obama was tapping into here was decision fatigue, specifically avoiding decision fatigue.
Now, decision fatigue states that people tend to make worse decisions after having made a lot of decisions.
This is precisely why many judges will give out harsher penalties, harsher rulings later in the day, later in the afternoon than they do earlier in the morning.
And President Obama was trying to minimize the number of decisions, unnecessary decisions, that he needed to make first thing in the morning when he got dressed, when he decided what to wear for the day.
Because he had much more important things to focus on.
So I think a valuable lesson for all of us.
Now yes, we are not the leader of a nation, or at least most of us watching are not leaders of a nation or a country.
But I think we can use this advice to our advantage.
So my question to you is this: how can you reduce the number of unnecessary decisions in your day?
We all have decisions to make, but how can we reduce the number of decisions, the number of unnecessary decisions that we need to make so we can be sharp, so we can be clear on our most important decisions?
I would love to hear your answer in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like, give it a thumbs up below.
And if you've not yet subscribed to Simpletivity, please do so.
It's absolutely free, and you'll get updates of new videos here on this channel.
Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
