Eisenhower Method to dodge all the “Blues”

Monday Blues or Morning Blues.

It’s 10PM on Sunday night and you suddenly realize the weekend is over. You take a deep breath and pause for leisurely contemplation and you know tomorrow morning is going to be as busy as last Friday afternoon. This is where all the “blues” starts.

Monday Blues! we call it. Isn’t it? Though do you know why?

Where did the term Monday blues come from?

Why is it “blue” and not “red” or “yellow”? While in reality “blue” refers to calmness.

As per multiple sources on the Internet, “American literature published around early 1900, reflects that the population in 1700, used to denote an excessive serenity state, and sluggish feeling to “blue””. The Monday blues were originally referred to as “Blue Monday”, where workers are still suffering from “post-holiday syndrome” and chose to take the day off due to high indulgence over the weekend.

According to a publication, after covid and due to “WFH”, around 20 percent of the working population suffers from either “Monday Blues” or “Morning Blues”.

So, now the question is –

How to avoid Monday Blues?

On the Internet, if you search “How can you avoid Monday Blues?” you will find numerous helpful articles that will give you a number of ways to avoid these blues, though one common activity is “Better Planning”.

And, unperturbably, this works and you get a sense that you have everything planned and noted in your second brain(your tasklist/notes). I have been using this approach for a long time now.

Now, the next question is –

How can I plan better to avoid Monday Blues?

The Eisenhower Decision Principle or Urgent-Important Matrix helps you decide and prioritize among tasks that you do on a daily basis.

Have ever tried creating a to-do list for yourself and kept your to-do list updated for at least a month or so? You will find that after some time, you have so many tasks on your to-do list that now you are not even able to recall why those were important or why you started them in the first place. This is where the mess starts and every morning you get a light anxiety attack with the sip of your coffee. This makes you reactive in nature and you will find yourself always in a fire-fighting situation.

Eisenhower Box consists of four quadrants as stated below. In which Y-Axis denotes importance and X-Axis as urgency. Now, group your task in one of the quadrants.

Urgent denotes tasks that require immediate attention and if not done as first priority then we have severe consequences and these are the tasks that put us in reactive mode. These tasks fall under short-term solutions.

Important denotes tasks that contribute to the long-term mission. Important tasks put us in proactive or responsive mode.

It’s a pretty instinctive distinction, yet most of us very often fall into the trap of mistaking important tasks as urgent and vice-versa. Similarly, treating urgent tasks as important can make us procrastinative in nature and create a dent in moonshot. So, choose wisely.

There are a total of 4 quadrants in the Eisenhower matrix.

1. Quadrant 1 (Urgent & Imporatnt)
   • Top-Left box of the Matrix.
   • Mostly consists of crises, issues, and problems.
   • These problems have a definite consequence of not doing it right now, as they have pressing deadlines.
   • Examples:
     • Fire in your kitchen,
     • Certain emails from the boss/customer about urgent issues,
     • Certain emails on job-offer,
     • Your health,
     • Family urgency(Call from your child’s principal, your family’s health, etc),
     • A last-minute deadline assigned to you.
     • Any hazard on your house or car.
     • Tax-related deadline etc.
2. Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent but Important)
   • Top-right box of the matrix.
   • Mostly consists of tasks that do not have a definite deadline but help you in fulfilling long-term targets.
   • These tasks are scheduled to be able to get them finished before they get into Quadrant 1.
   • Examples:
     • Exercise,
     • Date night with the wife,
     • Spending time on a hobby,
     • Car and home preventive maintenance etc.
3. Quadrant 3 (Urgent & Not Important)
   • Bottom-left box of the matrix.
   • These are urgent items and they demand immediate attention but they do not require your skill set and someone else can handle them. Therefore, assign them to someone else.
   • Examples:
     • Uploading blog posts,
     • Scheduling a meeting,
     • Responding to certain emails or Social media reviews etc.
4. Quadrant 4 (Not Urgent & Not Important)
   • In most cases, tasks for this quadrant are not permanent residents and they get to this quadrant after getting their priority reduced.
   • These tasks lengthen your task list but you will find hardly any time to work on them.
   • Do not confuse these tasks with taking a break from long work.
   • Examples:
     • Obsess about social media reviews or mentions,
     • Micromanaging Staff,
     • Scrolling social media feeds etc.

Does Eisenhower’s method of time management work in every situation?

The answer is “No”. Eisenhower Matrix is not effective in all situations. A few examples are:

• If you are not planning and organizing your thoughts on time and you seem to put everything on procrastination. In such a situation you won’t be able to take benefit of the Eisenhower matrix. For example, for your tax paper, if you are not waiting until the last day and if you have already scheduled for a time(Quadrant 2) in the near future then you can avoid it putting it in urgent(Quadrant 1) and it can be moved to important.
• Other examples are to identify what tasks can only be done by you vs what can easily be delegated to someone else to take care of, this is how you can avoid getting a few tasks into Quadrant 2.
• Similarly, if you are clearing out your work email/chat inbox within time then you can avoid them going to Quadrant 2.

So, the key suggestion is to be proactive and try to spend regular time with Quadrant 2 and Quadrant 3 to keep away their promotion to the next Quadrant 1.

How can I improve my productivity?

One quick trick to be productive is to protect getting things into Quadrant 1 as much as possible. The less bulky your Quadrant 1 will be, the more productive you will feel and fewer “Blues” will haunt you.

What I have observed is that most of us do not know how much time are we spending on each Quadrant on a daily basis. A few years back, I was also asking the same question to myself, and that day, I decided that I will calculate how much time I am spending on each quadrant.

A few months back I did an exercise, where I have done some modifications to the existing Eisenhower matrix to make it more effective and researched with a good cohort. You can read more about this stepwise trick to be at least 5 times more productive.