The Good Bad Box
If you’re like me, you want to love the Eisenhower Box.
It was invented by a president, it simplifies something complex and smart people recommend it all the time. But, it doesn’t work for me. It’s the productivity equivalent of that line Kate Hudson/Jennifer Lopez/Sarah Jessica Parker all say to Matthew McConaughey in various rom coms - “you’re not in love with me, you’re in love with the idea of me.”
If you don’t know what the Eisenhower Box is, it’s a tool to help you decide what to work on:
The Eisenhower Box, from James Clear
It tells you to do important + urgent stuff immediately, to schedule important + not urgent stuff, to delegate urgent + not important, and to ignore not urgent + not important.
But those categories only work if you already know what’s urgent and important.
If you’re in the early days of testing out a startup and your to do list has “run a few more customer interviews,” “follow up with people I spoke with last week,” “synthesize my notes into a few coherent customer segments,” “build an internal system to track all this stuff,” “schedule expert interviews,” and “get a landing page up to send to people after customer interviews to test intent”… which of those is most urgent? Which is more important than the rest?
So, entrepreneurs end up with 30 things in the upper left hand quadrant and the box is useless.
Luckily, I use a box that’s a bit more our speed.
The Good Bad Box
A little while ago I developed a method or prioritization that I like a lot better. My wife and I use it constantly in our daily lives. It’s called the Good Bad Box.
The Good Bad Box is also a two-by-two matrix, but the categories for the columns are “Good” and “Bad,” and the columns for the rows are… also “Good” and “Bad.”
The rows are for how you’ll feel immediately as you do the thing you’re thinking about doing.
The columns are for how you’ll feel after you’re done doing that thing.
The Good/Good box is what I call the “fun” box. You like doing it and you like that you did it. It’s a good box.
The Good/Bad box is where you feel good about the thing in the moment, but bad about it later. It’s called the Guilt Box.
The Bad/Good box is similar to type 2 fun. Hard in the moment, but you’re glad you did it later. This is the Marshmallow Box, named after that experiment where kids had to resist eating one marshmallow immediately to get two later on. Pain now, payoff later.
The Bad/Bad box is where you feel bad as it happens and you’re upset you did it later. This is a bad place to be.
Here’s what it looks like:
The Good Bad Box
For any given week, I’d like a split of ~75/25 Bad/Good tasks to Good/Good tasks. I don’t want any Good/Bad or Bad/Bad, which might seem obvious, but we’ll get to those in a second.
So, if I’m looking at my to do list, I try to think about which will be most painful in the moment, but I’ll be happiest I did later. This works well because the Bad/Good tasks are where all the value usually lies, and those are the ones that are easiest to avoid. If you were using the Eisenhower Box, you might call them “important but not urgent” and never get to them, because you can tell yourself there are always important and urgent tasks to be done. Because there probably are. And that’s the big shift.
In Life
As I mentioned, The Good Bad Box works great for all sorts of decisions.
Let’s say you’re considering texting your friend who’s got different political views from you a tweet that’ll drive home the point that you’re right and they’re wrong? Which box does that land in? Probably Good/Bad, and maybe just Bad/Bad. So, don’t do it. You’ll feel guilty later or just terrible in the moment.
It also works in reverse. You can pick the box you want an activity to live in, then back into that activity.
Dating someone for a while and it isn’t going well? What would live in the Bad/Good Box? Probably having the tough conversation about moving on from them immediately.
Trying to figure out how to get more customers in the top of the funnel? What might live in the Bad/Good Box? Finding an in-person event where your customers are at and getting out of your comfort zone to initiate conversations with 20 of them?
Try the Good Bad Box on for size. I think you’ll like it. No offense to President Eisenhower.