8 Issue One, Two Thousand and Twenty-Four but in the speech, he gave credit to an unnamed college president.1 His statement sent me scurrying to the dictionary to discover the difference between urgent and important. Urgent matters must be handled immediately, but important means that while still crucial, dental editors would have more time to sink their teeth into finding solutions. With many publication details piled up on editors’ very full plates, anything related to deadlines and production can seem both urgent and important. But the Eisenhower Matrix helps to create a form of organization based on levels of importance and urgency. Businessman and motivational speaker, Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People expanded on this method. The matrix is divided into four quadrants: 1. Do first. (urgent and important) 2. Schedule it. (important, but not urgent) 3. Delegate, if possible. (not important, but urgent) 4. Delete, or do last. (not important or urgent) Quadrant one tasks need to be handled immediately. These may be related to changing production deadlines, authors dropping out close to deadlines, your computer getting cyberattacked or crashing near deadlines (see the pattern of urgency here?)—anything that will Leadership Lessons The Eisenhower Matrix— Maximizing Efficiency Mali Schantz-Feld, MA, CDE have immediate negative consequences. This quadrant is the most stressful because the situation must be mitigated as quickly as possible. Quadrant one takes priority over everything. Quadrant two deals with things that are important, but will not cause super high blood pressure or prompt a call to your travel agent for tickets to any island that doesn’t have Internet or phone access. Important is getting your articles lined up for the next issue, learning a new skill or program that will make your editing, interviewing, or organizing easier, or calling potential authors for future assignments. Troubleshooting also falls into this category. For example, if you know that one of your authors has a tendency to drop out at the last minute or send the article in very late, have someone ready to write a replacement article. Achieving long-term goals is important to your success and a great stress reducer, so Quadrant two can be very satisfying. Quadrant three can be confusing, since these tasks can be urgent (meaning needing to be done immediately), but not that important (meaning they are not connected to your long-term goals). For example, a pop-up meeting without a clear agenda needs to be immediately attended but may not impact you in the long or short run. The tricky part FEATURED ARTICLE Continues As a leader in any profession, finding enough time in the workday to create a quality product can be challenging. Work can be a labor of love, but as Shakespeare so aptly wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” To retain enough brain cells to be up to the task day after day, it’s important to find ways to increase efficiency, maximize organization, and minimize chaos. In 1954, the 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in an Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, in Evanston, Illinois, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This quote is often attributed to President Eisenhower,
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