Musings on Leadership

 As a leader, you have unlimited demands on your limited time. Everyone wants something from you and they want it NOW! Trying to do everything NOW and please everyone is a sure-fire recipe for a nervous breakdown. That's where the 4 D's method of time management comes in handy. The 4 D method was famously used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and popularized by author Stephen Covey. This method forces you to consistently focus on important and urgent tasks. I wrote about this previously in The Eisenhower Box . The 4 D's are: Do it. Defer it. Delegate it. Delete it. Do it . These are tasks that are urgent AND important.  These are tasks that YOU have to do - and do immediately. Your top customer, responsible for 20% of your firm's revenue, has called and said they're going with another vendor. If you don't "fix" this, say goodbye to your nice bonus and prepare to explain to the company president what happened! Everything in your life comes to a stop. T...

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving 2 terms from 1953 to 1961. Before that General Eisenhower was the 5-star Army Supreme Command of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II. He planned the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and France. At other points in his life he served as the President of Columbia University and was the first Supreme Commander of NATO. Yet he also found time to pursue hobbies like golfing and oil painting! I think it’s fair to say that he was a productive man! And it should come as no surprise that his time management, task management, and productivity strategies have been studied by many people. Perhaps his most famous productivity strategy became known as the Eisenhower Box (or Matrix). I realize that you may not be founding a new government agency, revolutionizing some technology, or planning an armed invasion (You’re not - are you?), but you can still use the general’s simple decision-making tool right now. H...