Time Management & Productivity course review

So, the time has come to do a review of the Udemy course Time Management & Productivity.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

The course is designed to get you better at scheduling and managing your tasks using a method called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. It’s a fairly short course, so I went through all of it in an evening. And these are my thoughts about it.

This course is a hard one to rate fairly for a couple of reasons.

1. It’s short. But does short mean something is bad or of no value? Of course not, sometimes a 10 second pep talk can be all you need to get something done.
2. The material is very well known. Search on Google for “Eisenhower Decision Matrix” and you get 148 thousand hits.

But I’ll make this article pretty short also and say that I’m a little “meh…” about this course.

First reason for that is the cost. They want $49.99 for it, which is WAY to much. I got it on a sale for $10, which I think is the maximum I would pay for this course.

Second, but more importantly is the content of the course. They explain every part of the matrix and how to use it, but I feel that they could have done a better job of giving real life examples of the topics.

There is a video in there which is labeled “Personal Example”, and I’m sure it IS a fairly real example from the instructor. But all he ends up with is to repeat what has already been said on the previous videos.

If you want to learn about this topic and try it out I would recommend you start with this article from The Art of Manliness, The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks and Make Real Progress in Your Life.

There is one thing the course does better than that article and that is it’s methodology of HOW you define which of your tasks goes where. In short how they do it is:

1. List all your tasks
2. Rank them first by Urgent or Not Urgent
3. Rank each block into Important or Not Important

And one HUGE point about that 3rd step is that you rank them on the importance FOR YOU! Does the task help you further your goals or is it a task that help some other peoples goals? Only tasks important to you should go in the Important category.

So to sum up, will I recommend the course? If you can get it for cheap, then feel free to do so if you feel you need more than the article I linked above.
If you do some more Googling about the topic and think that is better use of your time, then give this course a pass. If you have some more questions about the topic, then drop a comment below and I will answer to the best of my ability.