Feb 24, 2026
On focus, delegation, and learning to eliminate faster.
There's a simple framework that shows up in business books, leadership trainings, and the occasional corporate slide deck: the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
Four boxes. Two axes. Urgent versus important. Do, plan, delegate, eliminate.
In theory, it's meant to help leaders prioritize work. In practice, it turns out to be just as effective outside the conference room, especially when life gets loud.
The irony is that if you're using it well, you shouldn't spend much time thinking about the last two boxes at all. The real work lives in the first two: what needs doing now, and what deserves intentional space before it becomes urgent. Still, understanding the whole grid matters. It gives context, reveals patterns, and exposes how easily we drift into reaction instead of choice.
We're a little over a month into the new year, which is usually about when resolutions fade and reality reasserts itself. I don't really do resolutions. Instead, I try to focus on first things first, choosing where my attention goes when everything feels important, and everything wants it now.
Do
I tend to set goals that live squarely in the "do" and "plan" quadrants. Less about grand declarations, more about forward motion.
I'm not really a writer. That's not false humility, just a fact. My brain works in bullets, checklists, and rough outlines. Turning those into something readable has always been a point of friction for me, especially in public.
True confession: some of this content is AI generated.
That's intentional. I'm not trying to write a novel or produce something deeply creative. This is more about converting a lifetime of internal bullet points into something concise and palatable, something I can share without overthinking every sentence. This is less about authorship and more about articulation.
More importantly, publishing this is the commitment. Writing it is the "do." It creates a constraint I'm choosing to live inside. Once something exists in the world, even imperfectly, it has weight. It asks to be continued.
This post is that first step.
Plan
Knowing what I wanted to do meant figuring out how to support it.
I needed a way to publish that felt closely tied to my online portfolio, not floating off as another disconnected platform or abandoned experiment. This space gives me room to think in public, stay anchored to the work I care about, and just as importantly, a place to tinker so I keep myself doing.
This post is admittedly reflective, but only as a way to shape the vision for what I actually want to be doing. It pulls from something I genuinely enjoyed years ago, writing practical, teaching-focused notes for budding technologists inside the companies I worked for.
I used to call those emails "Tuesday Troubleshooting Tips." They lived in my "TTT" folder and were unapologetically techy. SQL, workflows, edge cases, and all things NextGen EMR. They were never anything formal, just an excuse to explain something useful while it was still fresh in my head.
It's a shame they only ever lived in inboxes, but I digress.
Planning, for me, is about making sure momentum has somewhere to land.
Delegate
If I'm honest, I live most comfortably in the "do" and "plan" mindset. Delegation has taken on a different meaning over the last few years, especially now.
In 2026, delegating often means leveraging AI and LLMs. Not to decide what matters, but to help express it. These tools excel at taking rough lists and shaping them into something readable, something closer to finished.
That doesn't remove judgment from the process. It sharpens it. I still decide the structure, the emphasis, the boundaries. The machine helps with fluency and flow, not intent.
Used intelligently, this kind of delegation frees up time better spent on things that are not syntactic sugar. Judgment, framing, deciding what actually matters. The parts that still require human thought.
Eliminate
And do it fast.
In past years, I could have spent days or weeks chasing down ideas that might work, or might not, with no clear end in sight. Exploration can be valuable, but endless exploration often disguises avoidance.
Recently, while working through a technical proof of concept, ChatGPT gently pointed out something I had not fully acknowledged. A product idea that looked promising on paper would likely be shut down quickly by a major grocery retailer if it gained traction. Possibly within weeks. Faster if it attracted real users.
That realization saved time. Not because it killed an idea, but because it clarified reality early on.
I'll unpack that experience more fully in a future post, focusing on what I learned during the how, not just the outcome. For now, the lesson was simple. Elimination is not failure. It is respect for your time.
Knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to push.
First Things, First
Writing this changed something small but important for me.
Not because it revealed a breakthrough idea or unlocked a hidden productivity trick, but because it forced clarity. Putting this into words drew a line between reacting and choosing. Between knowing what matters and making space for it.
This feels like the first real step toward defining better habits. Not rigid routines or motivational checklists, but quieter patterns. The kind where decisions get easier because priorities are clearer. Where fewer things compete for attention because more things are intentionally ignored.
I don't have this all figured out. But starting here, with focus, with constraint, with first things first, feels like the right place to begin.
If this is the foundation, then the rest, the tools, the experiments, the lessons learned, can finally sit on something solid.