A simple chart can help you figure out how you should really be investing your time and energy at work

pulse

July 17, 2017 1:56 PM

Executive coach Amy Jen Su recommends asking yourself two questions to prioritize your responsibilities at work.

It might be time to eliminate a few tasks.

Becoming a manager should, theoretically, give you more freedom at work. Instead, what often seems to happen is that everyone starts demanding a piece of you until you feel like you've got no say over how you spend your days.

Amy Jen Su, co-founder and managing partner of Paravis Partners, has a creative solution to this common dilemma, which she explained in a video published by the Harvard Business Review.

As Su says in the video, you can use a four-quadrant chart to represent — and prioritize — all your responsibilities at work.

The X-axis represents your contributions: How much of an impact are you making on the organization when you do this task? The Y-axis represents your passion: How much do you care about this particular task?

Plot your responsibilities based on your answers to those two questions. Where each one falls indicates how you should prioritize it during your day.

Quadrant 1
and
priorities
Quadrant 2
tolerate
Quadrant 3
elevate
Quadrant 4
chop wood

Su's chart is equally useful for leaders and their employees — in fact, she wrote an article for HBR in January 2017 in which she framed this chart as a way for individuals to manage their priorities.

This analysis could be a natural follow-up to keeping a "Good Time Journal," a time-tracking strategy recommended by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book "Designing Your Life." Using the Good Time Journal, you keep a log of all your daily activities and how much they energize you; then, using the passion/contribution graph, you get proactive and retool your daily schedule as much as possible in line with your findings.

Maybe, for example, you spend the first hour or two of every day working on your priorities (what one productivity expert calls a "power hour"). That way, even if the rest of the day gets away from you, you'll have accomplished something meaningful for yourself and your employer.

Ultimately, drafting a passion/contribution chart is a nice reminder that you have more control over how you spend your time and energy than you might think.

Watch the full HBR video here

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