Deciphering the 4 D’s of Decision Making

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Confronted with important and urgent decisions throughout the day, mistakes can be made and time lost. Should I? Or shouldn’t I? Sometimes I feel like I’m poised on the brink of uncertainty…actually, most of the time. I feel like I’m looking at that sign in the photo and if I make the wrong decision, the consequences could be bad. 

Back country risks include death.

Maybe my choices won’t lead to death. But they can have serious consequences that could cripple or kill my momentum or progress. If I were to choose to eat a large biscotti with each and every cup of coffee, it might not kill me (right away), but it will definitely compromise my commitment to eating a clean diet to improve my wellbeing. 

Experiencing my own waffling and lack of decisiveness led me to learn how the experts do it. I don’t have time to be second-guessing myself or to try and assess what I should do when. Making good decisions efficiently improves productivity. Time is saved.

My reading and researching led me back to best-selling author and human potential expert, Jim Kwik, author of Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life. 

In a course on productivity that completed in September 2022, Kwik taught me a version of the Eisenhower Matrix, popularized by President Eisenhower. Using the 4 D’s of decision making, choices and decisions can be triaged into categories of importance and urgency. This simple technique can help us make decisions like a President! 

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Here’s the approach to decision making that we’ll follow.

• The urgent and the important
• The 4 D’s of Decision Making
  • Do
  • Defer
  • Delegate
  • Delete
• The most important thing

The urgent and the important

President Eisenhower had a remarkable process for making decisions. He was famous for being extraordinarily prolific despite extreme demands on his time. In a 1954 speech, Eisenhower referred to a dilemma of our time, “I illustrate it by quoting the statement of a former college president….This President said”…

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.

The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

Eisenhower leveraged this quote to motivate his audience to work cooperatively and collaboratively on the important and urgent problems of their times. 

We will learn his process to help us discern how to categorize our priorities in order to work more productively during our available time. 

The four D’s of Decision Making

Eisenhower’s decision making process was designed to separate and triage problems into categories that were prioritized by their importance and urgency. Popularized and adapted over time, his process came to be known as the Eisenhower Box or the Eisenhower Matrix. It is a time management tool that funnels all decisions into one of four categories: 

In this easy process, the choices can be described as DO, DEFER, DELEGATE, or DELETE. 

Do

If something is urgent and important, we should do it right away. These kinds of decisions focus on things that only we can do ourselves and need to be done immediately. Has a loved one been in an accident? Our response may likely be both urgent and important.

Defer

Something may be important, but not urgent. These are the kinds of tasks that move us forward toward our goals: definitely important, but with the flexibility of being something that can be scheduled and deferred. 

We do not defer indefinitely! The flexibility to schedule and defer gives us some breathing room so we can tackle the things that are important without getting stressed out. This quadrant is where we should spend the bulk of our energies. 

Once we have scheduled our tasks, we can plan to move through them. After all, they are important tasks, they just aren’t urgent. 

Delegate

If a task is not important but seems to be urgent, perhaps someone else can do it? Do we have a colleague or coworker who might assist? Or perhaps a friend or family member can help out. These tasks don’t require our personal attention and might include driving a child to an extracurricular event. Or preparing a PowerPoint for an upcoming presentation. If we can find someone to help us, this makes our available time more productive. 

Delete

These tasks are neither important nor urgent and may include things like catching up on social media, binge watching television, or any other task that we just don’t need to do. Period. We save the most time with the tasks that we never start. 

The most important thing

The point of triaging our tasks into these categories is to ensure that we are spending the bulk of our time doing the most important thing. As we plan our schedules and review our day, we always want to confirm that we focused on expanding and advancing our own self-defined priorities and commitments. In his course “Limitless Productivity,” I learned that keeping our own important things front and center is the best use of our time.

As Jim Kwik tweeted, 

Countless others have adopted and adapted this decision making matrix and intention, including Stephen Covey, as found in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (see Habit 3: “Put First Things First”). Millions of people have discovered adaptations of this decision making process to streamline their priorities and commitments. 

By focusing on the most important thing, we can use this matrix and the 4 D’s throughout the day to assess and triage our priorities into categories that we either do, defer, delegate, or delete. This will save us time and potentially spare us from decision making mistakes. 

The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.