The key is to not prioritize what’s on your schedule. But to schedule your priorities.
Stephen Covey
In April, I added a new habit to my morning routine – identify the most important task (MIT) of my day and get it done no matter what else I do in the day. Unfortunately, I haven’t had as much success as I have had with my habits from the last quarter. Although I executed this habit successfully only 75% of the time (“Challenges” section for more details), my productivity has drastically increased and I am glad I picked this habit, despite it being a challenging one. It is a work in progress.
What is MIT?
In a 1954 speech to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was quoting Dr J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University, said: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This “Eisenhower Principle” is said to be how he organized his workload and priorities. Identifying the MIT helps us to be proactive about thinking about our goals and what is important to achieving those goals.
Why MIT?
After my morning routine, my typical day starts at 6am. I am immediately sucked into doing urgent tasks – packing lunches for kids, dropping them at school, work meetings, dealing with fires at work, resolving impediments for the team, meeting deadlines for doc reviews, preparing for an upcoming meeting in the day etc. This is mostly how it has been over the years. However, if I want to be successful, I realize I should be spending my time towards “important and not urgent” problems. This is where working and prioritizing the “Most Important Task” of my day comes into picture. MIT is something that I need to do to make progress towards my goals. This is something, ideally, I have to get it done before 6a, before the chaos start. Or block a time on my calendar during the day to do this and not let anyone or anything capture this time block. Or it has to wait until after dinner, which is the time I use to catch up on my tasks, which is probably too late since we never know what kind of emergency tasks come up at the end of the day.
What was the outcome?
I am now being more intentional about doing important but not urgent tasks. I am at least making the effort to distinguish the tasks and write them down. As a result, my productivity has increased a lot. I don’t feel like I am a slave to my calendar anymore. I feel good about dedicating some time towards things that matter to me and my goals and not just reacting to fires. Don’t get me wrong. Reacting to fires, managing people, helping them, unblocking them, unblocking other teams, caring for my family, cooking for them, dropping my kids at classes, helping them with their work are important. But attending to these urgent tasks and not taking of “important and not urgent” ones where I need to be more intentional for a happy life such as allotting time for daily gratitude, spending quality time with family, reading, thinking about innovation, revisiting my goals, planning for them, chalking a path to achieve them and working on them are equally important as well.
Challenges
- Identifying MIT is not as easy as it seems. No wonder people get sucked into being more reactive and proactive. Being reactive to problems is easy. Being proactive and making progress towards goals requires upfront thinking and planning. In the same way, identifying MIT requires thinking and planning on what is important for me, what my goals are and what will take me forward and accomplish my goals. And I found out this is hard.
- Because of this challenging nature of the goal, there were times, I had no clue what to pick and I had pick an “urgent” task as my MIT and get it done. That really does not serve the purpose. But it is a good start. Even if I haven’t mastered all the goals and priorities, it is better to start somewhere than to not do it at all.
- We were out on vacation for a week to east coast with a tightly packed schedule. Most of the schedule was filled with activities we did as a family and were planned upfront. So MIT wasn’t really applicable to that week. It was an unusual week where all my habits went down the drain. However, I explained myself it is ok to turn down the dial during vacations and I shouldn’t beat upon myself.
- My March habit, which is to do daily gratitude as a family didn’t go well either. We missed it quite a few times. My plan is to not get disheartened and try getting back on track. I will try not to put extra pressure on the family but do it as often as we can so we still enjoy it.
Cheers to another important habit to my morning routine,
Sirisha
