How Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies Framework and Eisenhower’s Matrix help me create space for Deep Work
Do you find you easily complete tasks someone else expects of you, but struggle to make time for your most dearly held goals and plans? For me, this looks like always completing customer orders and never feeling like I have enough time to work on developing new products or learning the best ways to market existing ones. According to Gretchen Rubin, this makes me an “Obliger” in her Four Tendencies framework. According to Rubin’s website, “Obligers meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet inner expectations. Of all the Tendencies, Obligers are the biggest group, and the ones whom people count on the most. They put a high value on meeting commitments to others, but may have trouble setting limits and meeting their commitments to themselves.”
I first learned of Rubin’s Four Tendencies theory on her book “Better Than Before.” I immediately recognized myself in the Obliger type and could see a lot of what was and wasn’t working in my life in terms of my tendency. At the time, I was attending barre classes at a studio that featured many monthly attendance challenges where we’d all put our names on a board and check off which days we attended class. At first, this approach was phenomenal because it helped me establish exercise as a regular habit. Over time, I found myself prioritizing barre class attendance perhaps a bit too highly, to the point that I was starting to experience chronic aches and pains and not making time for revenue-generating activities. Over time, I’ve learned to be more mindful and balanced in what I allow to feel like an “external expectation” on me.
As I discussed in my most recent post, in 2024 I fell into a bit of a trap of valuing quantity over quality in my reading after I began keeping a list of completed books. Why did my Obliger tendency make me particularly susceptible to this pitfall? Just as my reading list transformed reading from a personal pleasure into a public metric staring back at me from a notebook on my desk, any tracking system can easily become a commitment device: a strategic tool that turns internal intentions into external accountability. For Obligers, who readily meet external expectations but struggle with internal ones, these devices transform personal goals into external obligations.
The key is choosing the right commitment device. My reading list backfired because it inadvertently prioritized quantity, a value I don’t hold. As an Obliger, I need a system that acknowledges how external expectations create urgency in a way my internal goals rarely do. When a customer is waiting for their order, the task feels pressing and immediate. But my own aspirations - even ones core to the success and growth of my business - lack that inherent time pressure. When I sit down to fill out the Priority Matrix - a time management tool famously used by President Eisenhower and later popularized by Stephen Covey in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” - Eisenhower’s insight rings true: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” I invariably find a lot of internal expectations in that upper right “Important but not Urgent” quadrant. Once I’ve made the imbalance visible, I can intentionally create structure around these essential but easy-to-defer activities.
The physical act of writing tasks in the Priority Matrix adds another layer of external accountability. Brain research shows that handwriting engages our neural pathways differently than typing, making commitments feel more concrete, which explains why I’ve always found a written list to “land” in a deeper place than a typed one. When I write down my business development goals alongside customer orders, I’m literally putting them on equal footing in my planning space.
Setting aside time to sit down and examine my priorities helps me ensure that my commitment devices are working for me and not the other way around. As an Obliger, I’ve learned to harness my tendency by thoughtfully creating external structure around my internal goals - making the invisible visible through the simple act of putting pen to paper.
How do you handle the challenge of meeting internal expectations? Have you found ways to make your important-but-not-urgent work more visible?