How former President Eisenhower and a $4 car wash taught me an invaluable lesson.
The moral of this story - messing with your priorities can cost you more than you think.
President Eisenhower is credited with creating a productivity, prioritization and time-management framework designed to help anyone prioritize tasks by categorizing them according to urgency & importance.
Imagine a 4-box square of quadrants. The upper left is urgent and important. The upper right is important but not urgent. The bottom left is not important but urgent. And the bottom right is neither urgent nor essential.
To manage your to-do list, you should categorize your tasks and goals and act accordingly, with the upper left demanding your attention, then the upper right, lower left, and finally, bottom right. It seems logical, right? Well, what happens when you let emotions into the mix?
Sometimes (when I’m nervous before a big pitch) - I will tackle an unimportant and urgent (debatable) task. One of those this week was to wash my car. One of my luxuries is going to a full-service car wash - an indulgence as these cost the equivalent of a good bottle of wine.
This morning, filled with nervous energy, I concluded the best use of my time was to clean the car, so I skipped the deluxe full-service wash and leapt at a $4 self-service wash (a bargain!).
Well, this was a morning I won’t get back. Vacuuming, wiping, washing, drying, and buffing - took me an entire morning, along with additional soft cloths, Armorall, and Windex. $4 became $25 in a hurry.
I burned through my budget, ate up valuable time I should’ve used to prepare for the pitch and focused on quadrant four (unimportant, not urgent) instead of urgent and important rehearsals for the meeting.
In hindsight, I could’ve taken the car to the deluxe wash, got my money’s worth, steadied my nerves in 20 minutes, and tackled my first quadrant duties.
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