How are you adding value to your hours?
Ask a room of senior leaders how they decide what to do first and you’ll probably hear them describe some version of the urgency matrix. In a full executive week, when nearly everything feels urgent and important at once, prioritising itself becomes one more task on the pile.
Last year I wrote about time agility and the way an hour expands or contracts depending on where your attention goes. In this piece, I explain a different way to decide what deserves your time.
Let’s go back a few years
The urgency matrix has a long and respectable history. Its central idea, that urgency and importance are two different measures, traces back to Dwight Eisenhower, the wartime general and later US president. Over the following decades, that idea was drawn into the four-box grid that many leaders still use today.
I say this with respect, because the distinction was useful at the time.
Today, the urgency matrix belongs to a command-and-control era, sorting work by external pressure and immovable “deadlines”. It measures how loudly a task asks for your attention, while saying nothing about whether the task is worth attention, or whether doing it will leave you energised or depleted.
For a leader whose scarcity is energy rather than hours, that’s a gap worth noting.
A handier pair of questions
The model I use instead is the Purpose Quadrants, from Amy Jen Su, executive coach and author of The Leader You Want to Be. I’ve adapted them through my work with C-suite and VP teams; the below is my working translation of Amy’s framework.
The model rests on two questions, asked of every meeting, project and request that reaches your desk:
- What value does this create? (Contribution)
This question looks past how urgent or visible the task is, towards what it adds for your team, organisation or a goal larger than the task itself. Many leaders define their contribution far too narrowly, which is the first correction I make.
- What type of energy does this give you? (Passion)
Some work leaves you sharper and more alive on the other side of it, while other work drains you in a way no amount of caffeine or chocolate can address. Passion, here, is information about where your engagement, and your best thinking, lives.
The four quadrants
Plot those two questions against each other and you get four quadrants, each pointing to a different decision:
- Prioritise - high contribution and high passion: Work that both matters and moves you, where your strongest thinking happens and you feel most like the leader you want to be. This is also the work most likely to be crowded out by everything louder around it, so the discipline is to guard this quadrant on your calendar the way you would guard a board meeting.
- Tolerate - high contribution and low passion: Work that supports a larger goal without ever exciting you, like reporting, governance and certain reviews. It earns its place because it keeps the system moving and clears the path for the work you care about, so you accept it with open eyes rather than resentment, and you keep it contained.
- Elevate - low contribution and high passion: The work you love that has yet to be recognised as high value. This quadrant is an invitation rather than a warning because it’s where you advocate for a strength, redesign a responsibility or take something you enjoy and grow it into impact. Many leaders find their next chapter hiding here.
- Eliminate - low contribution and low passion: Work that neither matters much nor gives you anything, and consumes your week all the same. These are the tasks to hand over, automate, streamline or let go, so your energy stops leaking where it was never meant to go.
Case study: A global luxury brand
I did the four quadrants exercise with the store managers of a luxury retail business, each of them responsible for their own boutique, team and targets.
When we mapped a typical week, their calendars were full of “urgent work”. By the old logic, all of it counted as important, because it all felt “pressing”.
The contribution and passion questions told a different story. A large share of their week sat in the tolerate and eliminate quadrants: daily problem-solving and low-value admin that kept them busy and kept them from doing the work they did best.
From there, we looked at contribution and rebuilt their weeks around what they could add, rather than around whatever felt most pressing. The change was in the question they sorted by. For example, instead of asking what was urgent, they started asking which of it was theirs alone to do, and where their energy went.
Once they sorted by that question, the work that drew on them most stopped being what was left for the end of the day, and the rest became easier to contain, simplify or pass to someone who would grow by taking it on.
A few weeks later, several of them were spending their best hours on the work that mattered most and, as a result, sales picked up naturally.
How to put it to work
You don’t have to run a workshop to use this. I practise a simple version of it with senior leaders: we take their actual calendars and sort them, meeting by meeting, into the four quadrants.
Amy Jen Su suggests giving each quadrant a colour and marking your week as you go. At the end of the month, you look back and see the proportions. You’d be surprised by how few of your hours go to prioritise, and how much of the week goes to tolerate and eliminate.
Tip: Revisit the eliminate quadrant often, because it fills up as soon as you stop watching it.
The question worth asking
If someone mapped your previous month onto these four quadrants without telling you, what would they conclude that you were hired to do?
This week, before you say ‘Yes’ to the next meeting, ask what it’s really worth, to you and to the people you lead.
With thanks to Amy Jen Su, whose Purpose Quadrants this article draws on
About the author
I’m Dorothée Oung, Executive Coach and Neuroleadership Expert. I work with senior leaders and executive teams to apply neuroscience in practical, results-driven ways. My goal is to guide emerging and established Neuroleaders through deliberate, evidence-based practices that elevate how they lead, think and show up in the world.
