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Author: Abdul Rehman Nawaz | The Author is a first year Law Student at Government College University, Faisalabad
Since the beginning of time, we have believed that human beings have been designed to reach a point of their self-actualization. To reach our self-actualization, we must make our daily lives efficient. In today's time, everyone's primary focus is to make their every day, productive. Technology has been supportive of this goal, so much so that we now have apps for the management of our tasks. It is believed that a person can make the most out of their optimistic self, with positive thoughts, task management, and by setting achievable goals daily.
Eisenhower Priority Matrix: a tool to help you do the right things at the right time
As a student of Law, I understand how much overwhelming it can be for a student belonging to any discipline to manage his schedule and now with the online learning model of education, things on the procrastination scale have gotten hefty. I would like to mention the Eisenhower Priority Matrix, also referred to as Urgent-Important Matrix. It has greatly helped me to keep my tasks in check and categorize them into Four Quadrant:
Focus (Which are your priority),
Goals (Your long-term goals/aims),
Fit in (Tasks which might be urgent but not important)
Backburners (Tasks that have no practical value or which need not be done).
The Eisenhower Priority Matrix helps you decide and prioritize tasks by their urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. Dwight had to make tough decisions regularly and staying true to his daily goals was extremely important for him. He had several tasks that he had to focus on each day. This finally led him to invent the world-famous Eisenhower principle, which today helps us prioritize our tasks by urgency and importance. This can be helpful for people of all ages. Students benefit from it while managing their studies and assignments, adults can make use of it by using it to plan their work life and it can be useful for even the old aged, as it could help them build routines that would keep them active even after their retirement age.
‘’What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.’’ ¬Dwight Eisenhower
Ike: an app to help you leverage Eisenhower Matrix
A playful to-do list in the spirit of Eisenhower’s priority matrix is the app ‘Ike’. This is an app that is easily available on the play store and can benefit many individuals to manage their daily schedules and help them in overcoming procrastination. This app has a simple layout with four colored themes that lets you stay organized with minimal distraction. You can add a due date to a task to give it a deadline. Due dates can repeat daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or be customized to a variety of configurations, such as “every 3 weeks on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday”, or “every 3 months”.
Ike allows you to add an image to a task to add more information about it, or to jazz it up. Images are seen directly in your task list so you don’t have to dig for them. Add audio recordings to a task using Google’s speech to text. Audio is played directly from the task list, and a speech-to-text is shown while the audio is playing to make it easier to access. If you want to quickly add a task with a lot of information, audio is the way to go. Celebrate your accomplishments with delightful animations, and visualize progress as you complete tasks. Task lists can be customized with a variety of color themes, some free and some pro.
Productivity is nothing but doing the right things at the right time. This app can help you save time and there is no resource as important as time. During the pandemic, many people have constantly struggled with ways to adapt to a daily routine. Life has taken a toll since the time ' work from home ' has become a necessity instead of a choice. Managing your documents, keeping track of emails, and everyday tasks such as managing health and stress, have also been tougher. Managing stress in such a pandemic is extremely important so that you can save yourself from going towards mental health issues. In this time, where technology has been our savior, it would be a blessing if this very technology helped us in keeping checks with our to-do lists. Let us manage our lives better in this pandemic and make sure we increase our productivity and save ourselves from stress.