Small Bites – The Eisenhower Box
Authored by Polly Shyka
Small Bites are short, informational articles with practical ideas about stress reduction, improved communication, and farm and family well-being. They are written by coaches from UMaine Extension’s Farm Coaching team. Farm Coaches are available at no cost to work remotely with farmers and farm teams.
When the pigs need new pasture, the salad mix needs to be seeded and the kitchen looks like a tornado went through, it seems impossible to tend to the back burner projects that are always lingering in the background. How do you prioritize which one to do? This time management tool, called the Eisenhower Box, can capture all of those back burner projects in one place. 
Urgent? Not urgent? Important? Not Important? You may wind up throwing out an unimportant, not urgent task after all. Or you may decide to delegate the important, not urgent ones.
The trick is making or finding time to attend to them. Can something wait until January? Or is there a two hour block you can block off to schedule time for yourself to address one of these longer-term but important projects?
Usually taking the first step is the hardest to get the list out of your head and on to the paper. The key is to address the back burner projects before they make it to the urgent state and everything jumps into the urgent and important box!
Try out the Eisenhower Box in a farm coaching session!