A twist on matrix task categorisation
I am typing here while my spouse sleeps and I ought to settle. I’m finding it hard to let go of the weekend and accept the week ahead. Mondays in particular are input-heavy days with many stakeholder meetings; combined this week with both school runs, a cricket club pickup and dragging all the kids to my eldest’s drama audition ... I am dreading the day. I worked a bit late on Fri and a little tonight just to try and make the week land somehow.
I can’t face typing up my week notes, so I will post below something I have started trying this week: a new way for me to categorise tasks. This takes an odd turn from the classic Eisenhower matrix and ends up more in the space of “how I need to plan my time”.
Below are the categories under which I list out tasks. The colours just relate to the highlighter pens I had to hand :-). You can still see the Eisenhower roots if you squint!
- 🟡 On fire (needs to be looked at now)
- 🔴 Needs focused time (Each item here needs to be scheduled and probably broken down further)
- 🔵 Collate to delegate (Group these by person and email or add to the docket for when we talk)
- 🟢 Quick nudges (When I want to remember to nudge someone by teams or email)
- 🟣 Bare minimum (Spend the least time on these, should be grouped together)
The blue, green and purple categories should each be treated as a single task in the red category; e.g. by grouping a load of nudge emails in one block of time.
I am still doing this as a simple bulleted list in plain text (using Obsidian at the moment, but could easily be in Notepad). If it's time-bound I generally have an entry in Outlook calendar or I put it in my plain text CAL.md file. I could put a date on the above tasks of course, but I seem to be operating in a very reactive space these days and so I just tackle these when I get some (rare) focus time.
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