Learning.  Working.  Exercising.  Connecting with others.  Worshiping.  Staying informed.  Eating.  Sleeping.  Grooming.  Shopping.  There has always been a lot to do.  But with the advent of computers, tasks mushroomed exponentially.  And with it, task management approaches have blossomed. 

Last week, we looked at how the Eisenhower Matrix a/k/a Urgent-Important Matrix helps with prioritization.  Named after President Eisenhower, who embraced this approach for distinguishing between important tasks, urgent tasks, and tasks that should either be delegated or deleted altogether.  In 1954, Eisenhower gave a speech in which he quoted an unnamed university president who said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”  For someone like a General or President, knowing the difference between Urgent and Important is key since every task is likely to be one or the other or both.  Using his approach, urgent tasks were those that were time-sensitive and demanded attention. These are tasks must be addressed but puts the person in a reactive mindset:  defensive, rushed, and narrowly-focused.  On the other hand, important tasks contribute to long-term mission, values, and goals. They may not yield immediate results (making them easy to neglect) but puts the person in a proactive mindset:  calm, rational, and open to new ideas.  The goal, then, was to try to identify important vs urgent tasks and focus on the former as much as possible.

Highly successful people generally are excellent managers of tasks and time. They guard their time zealously, govern their schedules methodically and prioritize tasks ruthlessly. Some people and organizations are so good at it that they come up with their own system or approach. 

When it comes to managing tasks and time, few organizations are better at it than the U.S. military. In fact, the U.S. Army’s slogan is “We do more before 09:00AM than most people do all day.” It is no surprise then that President Dwight Eisenhower, a former U.S. Army General, even developed his own Matrix for prioritizing tasks which became known as the Eisenhower Matrix or Urgent-Important Matrix.

People have been formulating ever-better systems and strategies to manage time and tasks for a long time.  In fact, the well-known Franklin Planner – created and sold by Richard I. Winwood in 1984 – was a planning system named after U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin, who kept a small private book to track his tasks, notes, ideas, appointments, and finances.  A core technique of Ben Franklin’s was to start each day with 15 minutes of “solitude and planning.”  He did this planning in a little book.  Similar to Ben Franklin’s book, the modern-day Franklin Planner was a paper-based time management binder.  Pages are drilled, loose-leaf style pages in different sizes, covers and formats, but all planners contain areas for appointment scheduling, prioritizing daily tasks, and taking notes on ideas.  A section in the back of the planner contains addresses, ledger sheets for tracking finances or vehicle mileage, exercise logs, and other individualized reference materials.

Employees are one of the biggest expenses for any company.  Deciding how many people to employ is always a moving target for most businesses.  Leaders struggle with who to hire, who to keep and, especially, who to let go.  Layoffs are especially difficult because they aren’t a reflection of the person’s skills, value, or attitude.  How to keep staffing at just the right level can seem a lot like Goldilocks’ search for the bowl, chair and bed that was just right for her.  Businesses look not only at their own books but also at news reports and key indicators for cues of when they need to expand or cut back on staff.  But given today’s news, even the most savvy business owners may not know what to think.  It seems like a tale of two very different economies.

A year ago, U.S. labor markets were crying about such a shortage of labor that it was pushing up wages.  Businesses could not find enough qualified people or hire fast enough.  Demand for products and services was going gangbusters thanks to a robust post-pandemic recovery.  There was more demand than supply.  Companies just couldn’t hire enough people to meet production demands.   In turn, that was spurring inflation.  In fact, the economy was so hot that the Federal Reserve hit the brakes and started raising interest rates to bring inflation under control. 

For the past two weeks, we’ve been looking at breaking habits that keep us from achieving goals.  Habits are nothing more than neural pathways forged in the brain.  Indeed, the human brain is composed of thousands of neurons that are connected by dendrites. During the process of forming a new habit, these dendrites increase in number and form new connections in the brain.  These connections are called neural pathways.

Think of neural pathways like a network of roads.  The first time a person does a task, a crude neural pathway is created… like chopping a rough path through a dense forest.  That is the learning process.  The more the task is repeated, the more an unpaved road begins to form.  With even more repetition, it turns into a habit.   When the habit is solidly formed, the neural pathway finally becomes a paved road.  The stronger the habit, the more it becomes a highway—strong and well-formed. 

Habits are powerful because they literally have an ‘unconscious’ mind of their own.  Habits are created in the basal ganglia part of the brain, the “primitive” low-level part that is also responsible for emotions and pattern recognition.  Habits are created by routines…. things we do every day, over and over, until we no longer need to think about what we are doing while we are doing it.  Habits get hard-wired into the brain and then deploy even without conscious thought.  Habits allow us to perform tiny, repeated tasks daily without having to mentally engage at all. 

Most people battle bad habits.  This is not a guess or supposition.   A survey of 9,400 Americans found that a large percentage had had the following bad habits that they wanted to change at some point in their lives:

With the start of the 2023 calendar year, everyone is busy making new years resolutions, formulating plans and setting goals.  The question on everyone’s mind is, “what do I have to do to be successful this year?”  People set actionable goals for themselves.  Get a raise in salary.  Boost sales.  Land a promotion.  Launch a business.  Earn a certification.  Change jobs.   Add new products or territories to a business.   Whatever the goal, the thought is that achieving that goal will result in success and that will make you happy. 

After all, from a very early age, we are taught that that success leads to happiness.  From grade school on, we are told that success is the key to achieving what one desires and the path to happiness.  It seems logical that being successful would make a person happy.  But others argue that it’s the other way around:  happiness leads to success.  So which is it?  Does success lead to happiness or happiness to success? Or is it a virtuous cycle where success leads to happiness which leads to more success which leads to more happiness…. and so forth?  It’s important to know if the goal is to be successful and that will make you happy or the goal is to be happy and that will lead to being successful. 

There are thousands of companies in the U.S. that specialize in sourcing top talent.  Retained recruitment firms. Contingency search firms.  Staffing agencies.  Recruitment Process Outsourcing companies.  And most companies have internal recruiters who are part of a company’s HR department.  There are also tools to help businesses recruit talent.  Job Directories.  Job Alerts.  Career Centers.  Temp Agencies.  Career Fairs.  Finding talent is big business in the U.S.  IbisWorld estimates that the Employment & Recruiting Agencies Market generated $28.5 Billion in revenue in 2022.  There are tens of thousands of articles, blogs, podcasts and books dedicated to helping companies improve in their hunt for qualified candidates.