Ever since the Eisenhower Matrix came along, we’ve learned to classify activities on a matrix of importance and urgency. Today, it’s very unlikely you’ll find any knowledge worker who has not at least heard of Eisenhower and his matrix.
What we’ll do today is to zoom into the importance part of the matrix and dissect it through a lens that is much less common.
Importance of an activity is sometimes obvious and sometimes difficult to grasp. If importance was intuitive and clear to us at all times, we’d most likely only work on the important things. But we do find ourselves sliding into activities that don’t move the needle for us (and for our customers).
So today, we’ll answer the following question: How can you tell if an activity is truly important?
By the end of this article, you’ll have gained a new way to look at importance. It will give you a way to filter your activities in a much more concrete and practical way.
Let us now look at importance through the lens of value, specifically value for our customers.
Lean Manufacturing has done an important job distinguishing different types of activities through this particular value lens.
Activities can be divided into three categories (source):
- Value Added Activities – these are activities that the customer experiences and benefits from.
- Necessary Non-Value Added Activities – these are activities that the customer doesn’t see, but you need to do as a requirement to deliver your offer.
- Non-Value Added Activities – these fall under the category of waste: you are not required to do them and sometimes doing them has a negative impact on the customer (and the business). Think in terms of simply adding one feature after another to an offer and confusing the customer.
Let's say, you are creating a digital product for your customers...
Value Added Activities might include specific activities that relate to the design or coding of the product. Here, a transformation of the product occurs that the customer can benefit from.
Necessary Non-Value Added Activities include book-keeping (unless you are a book-keeper :)) or ensuring that your product is legally compliant. These are still important activities but they are very different in nature to the Value Added Activities. Activities within this category don’t change your product for the better. When you complete these activities, the customer doesn’t perceive your product as more valuable. But, these activities must get done. The way to deal with these types of activities is to minimize them. Since they cannot be completely eliminated, we are bound, in some way, to deal with them. We could: outsource them, delegate them, or automate them. The only thing to avoid is to spent too much time on them.
Non-Value Added Activities include creating a feature that the customer doesn’t need or want.