How to manage your time?

 

I want to introduce Eisenhower matrix, or Important-Urgent Matrix in order to manage your time better.

This is a time management method used by Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th U.S. President

• Eisenhower matrix (Important-Urgent Matrix)

	Important	Not Important
Urgent	Highest (Do First)	Delegate (keep track)
Not Urgent	Schedule Gym Reading Learning	Lowest (Don’t do) surfing the internet without a reason gaming too long

Things are categorized with two dimensions:

• whether it is important
• whether it is urgent

After, things will fall into 4 quadrants

1. For "Important and Urgent" things, do first
2. For "Important but not urgent", schedule, things like reading, learning, going to gym
3. For "Not important but urgent", try to delegate someone else to do it.
4. For "Not important and not urgent", don't do

Why Google is successful?

 I have worked for Google for 3 years now.

Here are a few reasons what makes Google successful

1) Speed beats perfection

It is hard to get a perfect solution or it is even impossible.

The key is to iterate fast and keep improving. This is how Google works and one of the reasons why Google is successful.

In the traditional advertisement, to understand which ads or ads strategies work better, you can run an A/B test for different populations or different locations. This process takes months.

After you got the results, things might change as time goes.

At Google, everything is online and realtime. It is easy to do A/B tests for different users and get the results immediately.

This allows Google to iterate the algorithms much faster than traditional ads companies.

2) Important things first

Every quarter, we have OKR planning to decide what we will do.

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal system used by Google and others. It is a simple tool to create alignment and engagement around measurable goals.

For each item in the OKR, we set different priorities.

P0: important and must do

P1: Want to do

P2: Good to have when we have time

P3: OK, but I might not have time to do it.

We always do P0 things first. This is to make the best use of people's time. 

I also use it to set my family goal each year to decide what's the P0, P1 for this year and how we do with it.