Hi friend,

Have you heard of the Eisenhower Matrix? It's a way of sorting and prioritizing your work that looks like this:

The idea is that you sort work based on how urgent (time sensitive) and how important it is, and then either DO it right away, DECIDE when it will get done, DELEGATE it to someone else, or DELETE it from your list. This is also known as the 4D productivity method.

As with all things, if this is working for you, keep doing it. BUT I personally have a few gripes with this method, and I'll share how I think about it instead, in case it helps you!

My gripes

1. DECIDING when to do it is half the battle for small business owners. We have a LOT of important but not urgent work to do, and just casually treating "decide when it will get done" as the end of the process is not just unhelpful, it's insulting. If I could just decide when it gets done, Chad*, it would have been done already. The reality for most women I work with who are neurodivergent, doing a lot of unpaid labor, deeply sensitive, brilliantly creative, and highly ambitious is that many pieces of context are missing when someone just says DECIDE when to do it, and you're good. More on this later!
2. DELEGATING is easy when you are the LITERAL PRESIDENT (ahem, Eisenhower), but it is not easy for a solo entrepreneur or side hustler who has nobody to pass things off to. If you are wearing all the hats and hiring help feels out of reach, I see you, and I'm not going to tell you to delegate to thin air.
3. DELETING the non-urgent, non-important things seems fine in the abstract, but it's actually a recipe for deleting everything that is not productive from your life. Some of the juiciest bits are ❗️not productive❗️ though, and I don't want you to back yourself into a productive but boring and small life.
   ​
   Going to a coffee shop and chatting with a barista about life for a while is not urgent (unless you are as addicted to caffeine as I am) and not important (unless you are making a documentary about barista-ing), but it's an absolutely beautiful way to spend a Thursday morning that might spark who knows what for your work that day! Sure, you could argue that in itself MAKES the act important, and you would be right, but the point I'm making here is that we must leave room for wonder, and that happens in the non-urgent, non-important spaces.

A different kind of matrix?

What if, instead of facing a mountain of tasks and forcefully sorting them into these categories, then scratching our heads at how to realistically implement the classic 4Ds, we designed a work life that reliably accounts for and holds all of it?

I know, I know, wtf is that graphic supposed to mean. Here's my offering of a reframe for you-take what works and leave the rest:

1. Urgent + Important: DO Right Now Design time into your week to handle the most urgent and important things. I like to set aside at least the first hour of my work day M/W/F to handle the most urgent + important stuff. You might need time every morning for this, or maybe it's a part of your opening and closing shift. These are the burning fires, the sales follow ups where timeliness is important, the client questions, and the scheduling issues.
   ​
   Here's what goes into protecting the time to handle the U+I tasks for me, that I know is not possible for everyone:
   + I do not take meetings before 10am
   + If I know I have a lot of U+I tasks, I will wake up earlier to get a jump start on them
   + I do a lot of planning + systems work, as well as setting communication expectations to reduce the urgency, so I have less tasks that fit in this category
   + I am childfree by choice
   
   Your context is different than mine. Your U+I time might come in the evening or on Sundays. It might require more or less support to make it happen. You might have a business model that necessitates a lot more time for urgent tasks.
   ​
   But here is the bottom line: When we DESIGN a time for putting out fires, they do not derail us at other times of day from doing all the OTHER things we want and need to do. It will always feel like scrambling if you DO right now everything that fits this category, regardless of when it pops up. You don't have to always DO right now but you do have to know when the DO happens!
   ​
2. Not Urgent + Important: Decide when to do it Design time into your month for this work AND the supports you need to get it done. This often looks like some type of external accountability or body doubling, and there is no shame in finding the support you need to do the important work you want to do in this world. The world needs you to support yourself here!
   ​
   Some examples for ways to accomplish things like business planning, analytics review, systems work, deep work, content creation, and thought leadership (all IMPORTANT work for your business that might naturally fall to the bottom of your list or never happen at all), you might:
   + Join a virtual co-working group for body-doubling​
   + Hire a business advisor on monthly retainer so you are accountable to twice monthly check-ins
   + Start a peer mastermind group for both body-doubling and accountability.
   + Book a hotel for two days that is accessible enough you won't spend a lot of time traveling, but far enough away you can't be pulled back into normal life easily. This is my fave way to gift myself a deep work retreat and interrupt the norm!
   ​
   It's worth also noting here that I could write a 10 article series on various scheduling and project management methods. Everyone thrives with a different set of tools, and for some people which tools work is different at different times of the month. Finding which tools work for you to tackle the list in this category (which is usually the bulk of work work for small business owners) takes both tenacity and ruthless self-inquiry (and sometimes outside support). My own battle tested and finely tuned combo system of paper planner + google calendar + Notion + sticky notes for wrangling my work would likely not work at all for you! This is why the cardinal tenant of the SBR manifesto is Know Thyself.
   ​
3. Urgent + Not Important: Delegate to someone else Design systems that minimize the amount of this type of work crossing your desk. This is the quadrant where Soft Systems can create a huge impact in your business. We need to make sure that clients or customers have what they need, when they need it, without you having to DO something every time. We also need to set CLEAR communication guidelines so that anyone who touches your business knows what is actually urgent, and what is not.
   ​
   The work here is to try to prevent things from landing in this box, much like a game of Four Square. This requires methodically investigating what is actually landing here and why, and then designing soft systems to stop that from happening.
   ​
4. Not Urgent + Not Important: Delete it from your list Design white space into your life. There is something to be said for ruthlessly eliminating the to do list items that you don't care about and nobody else cares about either. AND, we can't always delete everything from this quadrant, nor do we always want to. The best way I know how to handle this is to design for white space, which is probably the hardest directive on this list. The universe abhors a vacuum and it will fill your blank space with so much bullsh*t if you let it!
   ​
   When we have unscheduled time, we can use it to tend to any quadrant, but it's especially good for tending to things that are not urgent or important, but are just fun, or will scratch an itch for our brains, or feel timely for some reason. In order to give ourselves permission to do ~unproductive things~, we must guard our white space vigilantly!
   ​
   My best tip for guarding white space in your calendar (which I am, admittedly, terrible at) is to think about your nostalgic little inner child. What gift of time do I want to give to baby Heather to explore that which is neither urgent nor important?

Easier said than done, I know.

If you just read through this newsletter and you're thinking cool, cool, cool, but I don't have time/don't know how/don't trust myself to design my business to feel less like everything is on fire all the time and more like I have creative time for my inner child ... you're definitely not alone!

The work of intentional business design is often simple, but never easy.

Which means you might need a little support along the way. If my cheeky little SBR Matrix brought up more questions than answers for you, let's chat!

*Chad is the fictional name I use to encompass all white dude productivity tech bro culture in shorthand. Yes, it's diminishing a diverse group of people into one pejorative for the sake of getting a chuckle from my readers who have been wronged by someone from this group, which I am aware is problematic. No, I am not open to feedback on this practice.

Warmly, Heather (Seaman) Bax Business Strategist & Head Wrangler ​Small Business Rodeo​

🌎 Tired of trying to make someone else's plan fit your unique small business? Let's design your world to fit you → Book a Human Designed Business Session​

🐴 Think you might be ready to Wrangle Your Work but not quite sure? → Let's chat.​

P.S. I leave in my em dashes because I refuse to change my writing style to prove I'm not a robot, but an LLM was nowhere near this email. Real thoughts from my real head, typos and all!