The Eisenhower Decision Matrix

Do You Have to Do It All Yourself?

Oct 10, 2022

Decision Frameworks

The first time I heard about VAs (Virtual Assistants) was in Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week. Cheesy title, great book. But I didn’t know anyone who actually used them until I met Natalie.

You hire VAs and outsource tasks that are urgent but not important. Tasks that are time consuming but don’t result in a high enough ROI to justify YOU doing them.

Say you run your own business. What is an hour of your time worth? For me it’s somewhere between $50 & $75. For Nat it’s closer to $350. For Elon Musk, it’s somewhere around $900k.

Once you know this number, it’s easy to delegate things that fall under that threshold. If an hour is worth $1000 to you, it’s worth it to pay the neighbor kid $50 to mow your lawn or shovel the drive.

If it’s worth $900k then it becomes worth it to spend thousands on a helicopter to get across town or take a private jet from SF to Austin to avoid sitting in traffic.

But this idea can be applied to Health and fitness as well.

The first part is recognizing what things can be handled by someone else. That’s where frameworks come into play.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a rather famous visualization of this idea.

You can use this same framework in your personal life.

Things that are important and urgent are those things that matter and that you have to do daily. Create habits to get these done without thinking about it:

Protein intake & nightly sleep. It’s important to hit your daily protein intake. Unlike with calories, you can’t just equate it for the week. It matters that you hit it each day, and to a lesser degree it matters that you maximize each meal. Same with sleep. We don’t have the ability to bank sleep for later. Ya gotta prioritize it daily.

Things that are important but not so urgent in their timing can be prioritized throughout the week:

Unlike protein intake, hitting your calorie target daily isn’t all that important. Hitting your target is important, but there’s no real difference between hitting your daily goal and your weekly goal. Each meal, and each day don’t really matter all that much in the context of a week. Same with training volume in the gym. Do it over 3 days or 6, the choice is yours.

There are plenty of tasks in your life that are urgent, they must be done today, but they’re not really important to the overall goal. Or it’s not important for YOU to do them:

Cooking meals, coming up with a workout plan. You need to eat every day. Yes. But if you don’t like cooking…don’t do it. Outsource that shit. Find a meal prepping service. Hire a personal trainer. Hire cleaners once a week to free up time that you could be spending in the gym/meal prepping.

If you audited everything you did in a day, you’d likely be shocked how many activities you perform on a daily basis that fall into this category. If you prioritize these items, you’re not going to progress. It’s as simple as that:

Fad diets. Meal timing. The anabolic window after working out. This shit doesn’t matter. Get rid of it. Feeling guilty after an unhealthy meal or a day where you skipped the gym? Cut that shit loose.

Recognizing what’s important and making time for it is 90% of the battle.

If you’re commuting to work 2 hours each way… your task is just that much harder. 4 hours a day, 20 hours a week that has been taken away from working out and cooking/meal prepping. If you’re single and your health is your top priority then it’s no problem. If you’re married with kids however, good luck making time for the gym.

Simply cutting your commute in half and getting 10 hours back would have a massive impact on your quality of life.

Exhausted from constantly having to clean the house? Hire someone to come every week or every other week to relieve some of the burden. It’s less expensive than you think.

Do you want to take a personal training certification, follow the top trainers and researchers on Instagram and read studies when they come out? No? Then you should probably just pay someone to write your programming. Free up your time to spend on something you actually enjoy.

Cuz that shit is complicated.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you choose. Only that you do choose. I probably spend 7-10 hours a week cooking. To Nat that’s insane. But I enjoy it. I like doing it and I’ve put enough time into it to get good at it. She’s happy to buy the lion’s share of the groceries if that means there are prepped lunches and I’m making dinner every night.

There’s a lesson in that too. You can always trade time for money. Or vice versa. Depending which you deem more valuable.

This kind of division of labor in a relationship is what helped me understand why you refer to your significant other as your “partner”. Which was actually a turning point in how I viewed relationships, but that’s for another newsletter 😉

Tid Bits

My favorite podcasters made an excellent point this week when talking about decision making. Often, we focus on the things we choose in life. The things we like and prioritize.

But we also choose the things we don’t like. We get to choose the prisons of our own making as much as we choose our priorities.

These prisons can be good or bad. A lot of my life revolves around my fitness hobby. I rarely drink because I want to feel fresh for my AM workouts. There are a lot of restaurants I just won’t eat because they don’t have food that will align with my goals.

I prefer to be in bed by 10pm for the same reason. Some people think this is ridiculous. Other people make most of their decisions on a daily basis based on their dogs. “I can’t, I’d feel bad leaving my dog alone for that long.” is a common phrase you’ll hear. Multiply that by 10 for people with kids.

Is that bad? No of course not. But it is a prison of your own making.

Triathletes train 20+ hours a week, sports fans usually have their weekends booked solid. We all have something that takes our time and influences our daily decisions. It isn’t necessarily good or bad.

Just be careful what you give that power to.

This thread is worth reading. It illustrates how easy it is to weaponize science. It’s so so easy to cherry pick data & studies to show whatever you want to show.

The data showed a 45% decrease in all cause mortality for men in the 18-39 demographic. FORTY FIVE PERCENT. That’s enormous. But of the young men who did die in the 28 days after their vaccine, more than you would expect died due to heart issues.

This thread breaks down the issues with reporting it this way.

Health Nerd @GidMK

Florida released an analysis of COVID-19 vaccines suggesting that immunizations (especially the mRNA ones) increase the risk of cardiac death particularly in young men Let's look at the numbers. I think the presentation of this analysis is extremely misleading 1/n

I Laughed

This video is incredible. One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. If I pulled this off and it were on video, I would literally never stfu about it. It would become my whole personality.