One big challenge that comes up a lot at work is that there are always more things to do than time and people to do them. There’s always tech debt that we want to pay off. Long-term migrations away from systems that are going to reach their end of life, that weird bug that nobody knows for sure what’s causing it, the big project announced publicly that has a lot of visibility. Meetings to attend, Slack messages, emails to reply to, conferences, patents, books to write. You get the picture.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool that can help you decide what to put on your schedule. You need to answer these two questions:
Is this important?
Is this urgent?
If it’s important and urgent, you do it.
If it’s not urgent, but it’s important long term, schedule time for it.
If it’s urgent but not important, delegate it.
The trick is to know how to distinguish between these two. For that, you have to know your team’s mission, your role guidelines, and your team’s process.
Personally, I am still learning how to delegate effectively. This is especially the case when many important urgent things are happening and it’s impossible to do all of them. This is when you should negotiate the urgency or importance of a task.