Feeling overwhelmed with too many tasks? Try this tool, it helped me overcome the panic of a heavy workload.
Tool for ‘too many tasks’ case
The tool is the ‘Eisenhower Matrix’.
It’s a four-quadrant chart. According to it every activity has two characteristics: urgency and importance. Check out this picture:
How to manage priorities with Eisenhower matrix
If a task is both important and urgent, tackle it.
If it’s important but lacks urgency, schedule it.
The other two? The not important stuff – delegate it or drop.
This helps you focus on what truly matters.
Typical pitfalls
You feel overwhelmed when you try to do everything simultaneously because it all is so important.
Often, we mix up what is really important with what is simply urgent but not that important. This is the bottom right part of the matrix. When a task is urgent, we feel like we don’t have time to think about it; we must handle it right away.
Another typical mistake is hurrying up to do a task that is important but not urgent. This is upper left part of the matrix. This is because we often equate important with urgent, not differentiating between them.
And lastly, there’s the part that’s neither important nor urgent. Unfortunately, we sometimes find ourselves in this category. I’ve been there myself… This tends to occur most frequently when we operate on autopilot. We receive a task—do it. Another task comes our way—do it. And so the cycle continues. It’s important to pause and reflect. Avoid always going on autopilot without breaks for recalibration.
‘Too many tasks’ can be tackled without feeling overwhelmed.
Give it a shot and see if it helps you too.
Read this if you feel you have many tasks of the same priority, all from the upper right part of the matrix – My Competing Priorities: Get Unstuck In Just 9 Minutes.
* In the original time management matrix, the quadrants are arranged slightly differently. Here, I’ve positioned them along the axes from zero to one, as this arrangement appears more logical to me. However, this adjustment does not affect the essence or benefits of the matrix.