Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
096: A Tool to Prioritize Your Day
The real reason most high-achieving men feel behind: they’re busy, but not productive.
In this episode, we share how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to stop the overwhelm and start making real progress—in business, relationships, and training. This quick mindset and strategy shift will help you get clear on what actually matters.
Highlights:
- Why “busy” doesn’t mean productive
- Four types of tasks and how to categorize them
- The easiest way to clean up your to-do list
- Where real growth happens (hint: it’s not in your inbox)
- Adventure update: Rim-to-Rim hike training recap
Grab your to-do list. Take 10 minutes. Categorize everything. You’ll walk away with a sharper focus and more peace of mind.
Stop Losing Your Temper Road Map
This roadmap will teach you how to have more patience.
To give your kids more time and attention.
Anger isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Learn how to manage it so it doesn't get the best of you.
https://www.tommygcoaching.com/roadmap
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is gonna give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode number 96. Hope you're doing well, thank you. Thank you for listening. Tuning in, appreciate you guys listening to this podcast Today.
Speaker 1:I'm feeling sore. I hiked 11 miles and 2,000 vertical feet this past weekend. It was part of our training for the Rim to Rim hike in the Grand Canyon and there were guys all around the country. We were all trying to do the hike, coordinating it on the same day. I think seven or eight of us all did it last Saturday, sending pictures to each other, hyping each other up. It was a blast and I'm feeling it today. So that's why we train so I can be ready for 22 miles in a couple months. That's where I'm at today.
Speaker 1:What I want to talk about today on this episode is prioritization and making sure that we're working on the right things. So I was talking to one of my clients the other day and this is a guy that we've worked together for a while. He has this motto I'm productive, I'm proactive and I'm organized and he's been running his business I think they just celebrated 12 years and he's dialed and in our last coaching session he came to me with not feeling very productive and he was just telling me how he feels. Busy all day. He's not idle, he's not numbing out and scrolling on social media, but when the day's over, he looks at his to-do list and nothing is checked off. And I think this is a problem that a lot of us run into. We have these things on our to-do list that we want to get done, that we want to prioritize, and then the day gets away from us and the things that we really wanted to get done don't get done. So this is a problem that we want to solve and we can easily solve it. It just takes a couple minutes of sitting down and looking at that to-do list and dissecting it and prioritizing it. So today I'm going to talk about how to do that, because it's not about getting a lot of stuff done. It's about weeding out the unimportant things and getting the right things done, the things that are going to let you hit your goals down the road. So how well do you control your attention? Because everything out there, everything external of us, our phones and our screens and all the apps on there, the people in our life, our employees, our family they're all screaming for our attention. They're all trying to get our attention and our brain thinks that all of it is urgent and all of it needs our attention right now, and that's what gets us overwhelmed. So today we're going to learn how to manage the brain. So we're focusing on the right things on our to-do list and we're going to use the Eisenhower matrix to break this down.
Speaker 1:And some people keep their to-do list up in their head and that is not a very strategic form of productivity. Our brain is meant to process. It's meant to think creatively. It's not meant to store information, it's not meant to be a memory bank. So all these things we're trying to remember that we have to get done, we got to get them out onto a to-do list, and that could be pen to paper and writing out the long list that you have to do. It could be a task manager in your phone, it doesn't really matter, it just has to be out of your head, and there are set processes out there that people teach. The one school that I went to, the life coaching school that I went to taught a process called Monday Hour One, and David Allen has a book called Getting Things Done and there's a process that he teaches. Those processes are awesome. What I've found for a lot of guys is that a set process like that can be overwhelming, and what I teach is just get it out of your head, pen to paper or those apps on your phone, get it out. That's all you need to do. Get it out, that's all you need to do. Once you have your to-do list, we want to prioritize it.
Speaker 1:No-transcript. It's a way of thinking that separates your to-dos into four different categories so you can decide what you're going to work on. The four categories are important and urgent, not important and urgent, important, not urgent and not important, not urgent. Important, not urgent and not important, not urgent. So if you're looking at this visually, it's four quadrants there's importance and there's urgency along the two axes. I'm just going to talk about the four categories and then at the end I'll show you how to use pen and paper to dissect it.
Speaker 1:But let's dive into the important and urgent category of the Eisenhower matrix. These are the tasks that have a deadline, that are coming up really quickly. So this podcast fell into my important and urgent category. I have a deadline to get it out and posted on Tuesdays. That deadline's coming up. That's what I have to do. Anything in this important, urgent section is do it now, focus on it, prioritize it, do it right now. Another thing on my important and urgent is finish an agenda for a training call that I have with this team of founders that I'm working on. We're going to be talking about working under pressure and I need to finish what that training looks like in the questions we're going to workshop through there.
Speaker 1:Another example of what would be important and urgent is a client issue that pops up and it's on an active deal. There's something happening, there's something that needs to move quick so you can close this deal, and it pops up. That becomes urgent and important. Now, what we want to really recognize about important urgent category there shouldn't be many tasks in here. There should only be a few. Shouldn't be many tasks in here. There should only be a few.
Speaker 1:Emails tend to sneak up into the important and urgent and we start to do it now category and 90% of emails are not important. They might be urgent, people might want a response right away, but it doesn't mean that they're important. And that brings us to the second category, which is not important and urgent. Things that need to happen pretty quickly but they're not important, and this is a hard one to categorize. Sometimes, to decide that a task isn't important and the way I want you to think about it is that important means you're moving the needle on your goals. This task is going to create the future that you want. That's how you're going to decide if it's important or not, and we live in a culture, an environment, where we associate busyness and productivity with value. So the busier we are, the more we get done, the more things we check off the box. That means we're doing well, that means we're doing a good job, and the problem with that is we start prioritizing tasks that are urgent but they're not important. They're not leading to those long-term goals.
Speaker 1:Someone pops into your office to grab you for just a quick second. It feels urgent, but if it's pulling you away from some focused work that you are doing, it's not important. Other tasks that fall into the not important urgent category are meeting invites. Just because you're invited to a meeting doesn't mean you need to go to it. So figure out what meetings you need to go to, that are important for you to be at, and ones that you can delegate or say no to.
Speaker 1:Emails, text messages these are some of the tasks that feel urgent but they're really not. They're not important. Our brain thinks they're urgent, but they're not very important and they don't need our immediate attention. I had a boss that came back from vacation and she had 243 unread emails and she deleted all of them and just started with a clean slate and she never heard any flack from anybody. She heard about this tactic from some other person and she wanted to try it out. If there was anything important enough that needed her attention, someone would reach out to her again. They'd email her again, they'd call her, pick up the phone, they'd stop in her office. So that's how unimportant emails are. So this category not important, urgent.
Speaker 1:What we want to do with tasks that fall into this category are delegate them or minimize them, and I'm not going to dive into that on this podcast. If you do want to take this to the next level and learn how to delegate and minimize tasks that aren't really important, that's something I can do in a strategy session, which is open on the website if you want to book one of those, but right now we're going to just focus on prioritizing our to-do list. All right. Next category important and not urgent. These are the ones that usually get procrastinated.
Speaker 1:So when I was working with my client and he was saying that the days were getting away from him Nothing was getting checked off his to-do list I had him look at his to-do list and asked him what on there has been sitting there for a little bit and you've maybe been procrastinating on it, but it's going to drive business forward. It's going to move the needle for the future of the business. And right away he was like reach out to investors. It looks at me every day and I never get to it. So this task that falls into the important but not urgent gets scheduled. It goes onto the calendar. So you know that you're going to work on it. You're going to set aside time to do these types of tasks and that's what we coach through. We coach through when is his energy high, when does he have an opportunity to focus? And we dialed that in and he put it on the calendar for the next two weeks to call two investors every day for the next two weeks and each day. I got a text from him every day for the next two weeks and each day I got a text from him, nailed it, got it two more called. He took a task that was important but not urgent and prioritized it by putting it on his calendar and got it done. So this category is about the strategic thinking that needs to happen. It's about the proactive work that we need to do.
Speaker 1:A lot of our personal tasks that are going to bring us our fulfillment in our relationships at home, as a father, as a husband. These fall into important, not urgent. So we need to schedule those things Family dinners, one-on-one time with kids, date nights. If we don't schedule it, those are the things that just keep getting kicked down the road. Working out, training, keeping yourself healthy, prepping meals same thing with those. Those are important tasks that aren't urgent. We want to move those up on the priority list by scheduling when we're going to do them.
Speaker 1:Last category not important, not urgent. The tasks that fall into the not important, not urgent probably aren't on your to-do list, but they are things that we put our energy towards. Could be YouTube or any of the social channels. It could be scrolling on LinkedIn and you're pretending that it's networking, but really you're just scrolling. I tend to do that sometimes. That's not important, not urgent. These are usually the tasks that we do to numb out. We are avoiding doing something uncomfortable, probably something in the important not urgent category, or the important urgent category. We're avoiding those and we dive into these activities that drain our energy, aren't important, aren't urgent. All right, those are the four categories of the Eisenhower matrix.
Speaker 1:Now what I want you to do is take five to 10 minutes and organize your to-do list, write it all down and then do this exercise with the Eisenhower matrix. You go online. You can print off actual matrix with the four quadrants or you can draw it once you see it online and you just go through each tasks. I'm telling you, when you do this, you're going to be feeling less chaotic, less overwhelmed, more focused, more understanding of what you should be working on. And this is the kind of task, a small little thing, that's going to change how you execute your life and it's going to save you time in the future. You're going to feel more balanced, and that's what it's all about. So this little trick, take it, use it, appreciate you guys being here today. Thanks for listening. Have an awesome day and I'll catch you next week.
