How many of you, faced with the sudden and dramatic emergency of Covid-19, found yourselves a bit lost, suspended in an indefinite time that no longer has the urgencies and certainties of "before"?
It is perfectly normal to feel disoriented, and acknowledging it is the first step in facing and then managing this state of uncertainty.
Who among you hasn’t experienced denial, anger, or frustration about this situation, at least once or more times in alternating phases?
As psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross explains – who in 1969 developed the model of the "five stages of grief," designed for processing loss – these emotions are necessary and functional for accepting the new, unwelcome, but experienced situation.
Over time, and if we experience them with awareness, emotions will begin to stabilize, and we will start to realize that we can feel good even in the "now," despite the objective difficulties and limitations.
Good days will alternate with heavier moments, but gradually we will be able to readjust our routine and transform our daily life from an extraordinary exception into a new balance.
Acceptance allows us not only to be more at peace but also to free up energy, which we can reinvest in constructive activities.
The first, and most immediate, is "to bring order."
Who among you hasn’t taken advantage of being at home to tidy up a drawer or a closet that you never got around to because you were always rushing and didn’t have time? How did you feel afterward?
This need for order is projected outward, but we can also use it metaphorically to bring order into our lives.
For example, let's think about work: we can take advantage of this time to reflect on what is truly important to us, freeing up quality time to dedicate to meaningful projects that we have never realized, caught up in a thousand urgencies.
An effective exercise to train ourselves in better organizing priorities—those that "before" seemed too many and sometimes insurmountable, which in many cases have now disappeared, and to which "after" we can learn to give the right weight and manage more effectively.
The Eisenhower Matrix
In this exercise, the Eisenhower Matrix can help us. Eisenhower, a general and U.S. President in the 1950s, developed a method for time optimization by suggesting that we divide all our professional and personal tasks into a matrix based on urgency and importance.
Many are certainly already familiar with it, but it’s likely that they don’t always put it into practice, so here’s the opportunity to revisit it.
On the x-axis (horizontal), urgency is indicated, from "can wait" (on the left) to "do immediately" (on the right), while on the y-axis (vertical), importance is indicated, from "low" (at the bottom) to "high" (at the top).
We are offering here a graphical version of the matrix, which you can print and fill out multiple times or at different moments.
Some instructions for use: "important" is a subjective concept, because what is important to you may not be for someone else.
Priorities are indeed linked to our values, principles, and goals, and therefore, they can be different for each of us.
Learning to manage them with awareness of our value system is essential for effective time management, especially when working in a team and during such a unique period.
Let’s not take anything for granted; let's spend five extra minutes aligning with our colleagues – and with ourselves – on this before starting a new task.
And let's think about the projects we regret not having done, in our current job or if we could have done something else, to understand what we truly give meaning and value to.
It’s a luxury we can afford in this phase, the luxury of thinking about what we would really like to do, if we had the time.
And it’s a powerful question because it helps us understand what we truly want and what holds us back, distinguishing between "excuses" driven by daily urgency and fears or concerns that we can analyze and face.
For example, we might realize that "before," we were regularly in the top-right quadrant, "do," overwhelmed by daily activities that were fulfilling but too pressing.
In this case, a good action plan for the "after" could be to commit to better scheduling valuable projects and activities, so that we can carry them out gradually and progressively, before they overwhelm us.
But we might also realize that in the recent past, we have always found ourselves in "emergency" mode for things that were actually of little importance, in the last gray row, particularly in the bottom-right quadrant.
In this case, now with the hindsight of "later," we have a unique opportunity to realize that we often wasted time, diverted our attention to activities with little or no added value.
While the concept of "urgent" is objective – and depends solely on the time variable – it is far from being synonymous with "important."
Of all those activities that required immediate attention or were due in the very short term and we had to manage, perhaps some of them could have been avoided by learning to say a few "no's."
Or we could have delegated them, to focus on more important matters.
Let’s make the most of the experience, and the time we have to reflect on it, so that we don’t make the same mistakes “tomorrow” when we’re back out there, in the field.
