By Minessa
Hey there! Are you ready to hop back into the whirlwind of daily tasks and figure out which ones truly serve you? Remember the little list-making activity we talked about in the last video? By now, you’ve had a glimpse of your day’s narrative – the expected, unexpected, and the things that creep in to every day
Download the workbook from this post.
Back in my early days as a research administrator, a lesson hit me hard. One my earliest mentors taught me this – Not every frantic email equates to an emergency! Just because someone’s hair is on fire doesn’t mean you need to drop everything to put it out. It took a while, but I learned to set boundaries around urgency, recognizing which truly demanded my immediate attention and which items could be triaged or even forgotten altogether.
Enter the Eisenhower Matrix.
This ain’t your run-of-the-mill tool. This matrix became my constant around 10 years ago. While you can deep dive into my extended video series for the nitty-gritty, let’s do a quick overview here:
- Urgent & Important (green): This is all you! Needs immediate attention, and you’re the one to handle it.
- Not Urgent & Important (purple): Important tasks, but they’re not pressing. Schedule ’em!
- Urgent & Not Important (orange): Time-sensitive, but maybe someone else can handle it. Delegate if possible. This is where my Commitment to Clockout system shines, peeps!
- Not Urgent & Not Important (pink): These tasks might just be relics from past processes. If they aren’t serving you now, why keep them
Let’s talk reality for a sec.
Changes stir waves, and people resist – I resist change like nobodies businss. One of the ways my autism manifests is Opposition Defiance, which means no matter what you say, I’ll respond with no. It’s immediate an it happens vehemently. People around me know – sit and wait 5 minutes and my actual brain will catch up. Each of us has our own tolerance for change, and we’re surrounded by others who have varying levels of tolerance. That’s human. Which is why we need to set our own boundaries around individual activities, so we’re not constantly responding to other people’s ideas of what we need to be working on – especially when we have so many stakeholder’s we’re responsible to. For more about boundaries, check out the Commitment to Clockout Collection on Patreon.
Now, the magic step: intentionally designing your day.
How would your ideal day look, unfettered by current obligations? It’s not about a rigid schedule, but rather paving a path toward what lights you up. You don’t have to be on the mark each day; it’s about moving towards that mark. A heads up, though: you might’ve attempted rigid time blocks before and felt boxed in. The key here isn’t rigidity, but understanding the heart of what you want from your day. Your intention!
This is about mastering the flow of your day. It’s like being on a river. Either you flail about, or you navigate with skill, steering your boat where you want to go. Star Trek DS9 hit the nail right on the head for me