Focus on What Matters

Focus is essential for all the teams that want to be successful.

We live in a fast-paced world, so it’s easy to get bogged down by distractions and not be able to concentrate energy, effort, and attention on the task at hand. When a team stays focused, it allows working more efficiently and effectively. It avoids wasting time on low-impact tasks and initiatives.

Focus fosters motivation, and when a team can achieve its objectives, this can lead to a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. There are several ways to improve focus, such as: identifying and prioritizing the most relevant tasks, setting clear goals, removing distractions, etc.

My teams work a lot by focusing on what matters most. In our journey, we discovered the Eisenhower Matrix, and this is our template.

Our Eisenhower Matrix version, as you can observe, is a Cartesian plane, where the x-axis represents the urgency. Instead, the y-axis represents the importance. Here we can classify a task with three nuances of urgency or importance: low, medium, and high.

We create a post-it for each task, user story, or epic and put it in the right box along with our Product Manager. Sometimes we argue about the perception of importance or urgency. It helps to be all on the same page.

We are all responsible for updating the matrix, and we used to update it during the planning meeting.