The Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix (or Eisenhower Box) is an easy, yet extremely effective way to figure out how to prioritize your tasks so that the most important don’t fall by the wayside to the sudden, unexpected, and urgent ones. Here's a quick video tutorial for how to organize your tasks into the do, delegate, decide. The Eisenhower Matrix (or diagram), is also known as the Eisenhower matrix, an incredible tool that can help you to prioritise your tasks based on criteria such as urgency and importance. And Notion is an All in One Workspace really powerful that you can use as a Note-Taking App, Todo list, Journal, and many more, it’s up to you how to use it. The Eisenhower Matrix is a way to prioritize your tasks based on importance and urgency. The Matrix consists of four quadrants: Do, Decide, Delegate, and Delete. Using it can provide some structure to how you handle your tasks. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States is credited with developing the Eisenhower Matrix.
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Your task list can seem quite daunting and overwhelming, at times. Making sure that you eliminate the unnecessary tasks and prioritize the ones that you actually need to do is crucial. Using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize what you do can make you more efficient and help you manage your time. It can also help you sidestep the constant feeling of considering everything to be urgent. Let’s look at the features of the Eisenhower Matrix and how you can use it.
Eisenhower Matrix: Quick Look
What is The Eisenhower Matrix?
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States is credited with developing the Eisenhower Matrix. Stephen Covey popularized it as a productivity practice in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a great read if you want to become more efficient and manage your time better.
Using the Eisenhower Matrix you can add your tasks in one of the following four quadrants:
- Urgent and important
- Important, but not urgent
- Urgent, but not important
- Neither urgent nor important
It is an especially helpful tool to use if you constantly keep switching from one “urgent” task to the other and have no set plan. It is also really effective in showing you which tasks you should delegate if you have a problem with delegation. Using the Eisenhower Matrix is just as effective for chores at home or if you are studying at home.
Quadrants of The Eisenhower Matrix
Let’s look at each of the quadrants of the matrix in detail.
1. The “Do” Quadrant
These are the tasks that are important and urgent that need to probably be finished the same day or by the next day. Procrastination and distractions while dealing with these tasks could result in adverse consequences. Using the Pomodoro Technique can help you deal with procrastination and staying focused.
2. The “Decide” Quadrant
The tasks in the Decide quadrant do not need to be done right now so you can create a schedule and set a completion date. It is important to note that letting procrastination or other tasks derail you from the set schedule would mean you will have to complete the tasks in this quadrant at the last moment. Set a realistic schedule for these tasks and make sure you follow them.
3. The “Delegate” Quadrant
These are tasks that are urgent which do not necessarily need your complete involvement. In these cases, even though you have a deadline to hit, you delegate these tasks to someone else. In these cases, you take more of a managerial position. This gives you some time to focus on your urgent and important tasks in the “Do” quadrant.
Eisenhower Matrix App For Surface
4. The “Delete” Quadrant
There are tasks that take up your time but do not add much to your end goals. These could include tasks that you or someone else “thinks” are important or just distractions that keep you away from your important tasks.
Things to Keep in Mind
Here are some things you need to consider to use the Eisenhower Matrix much more effectively.
Consider Elimination
Being busy is a badge of honor people like to wear, especially at work. While trying to flaunt this badge, people tend to lose focus on their end goals and what they should really be dedicating their time towards. Many times, we do something just to make ourselves and others feel that we are busy and “productive”. However, eliminating these “filler” tasks by adding them to the “Delete” quadrant would make you more productive.
When reviewing everything you have to do, take into consideration if the task fits your end goal or helps you develop your skills. Eliminating unnecessary tasks is a lot more efficient as opposed to doing something just to look busy.
Urgent vs Important
It is not uncommon to conflate “urgent” and “important”. Dwight D. Eisenhower once said:
“What is Important is seldom Urgent and what is Urgent is seldom Important”
Let’s define these two terms so that it is easier for you to sort your tasks.
Urgent: Tasks that need to be done now. Urgent tasks require immediate attention and need to be dealt with within a short time period.
Important: Tasks that add to our overall development and help us achieve our goals, personal or professional.
Failing to see the distinction would mean that you would see all your important tasks as urgent. You would end up adding a lot more tasks to the “Do” quadrant than you should which will become overwhelming.
Understanding Delegation Better
We tend to look at delegation as something managers or rich people do. But we can all benefit from delegating our tasks.
When talking about delegation, people usually visualize delegating tasks to other people. However, you can just as easily also delegate certain tasks to an app or software. For example, when I wanted to auto-schedule my gym days in my Google Calendar based on the weather, I wrote a simple program in Python. You can also delegate managing your money and investments to a RoboAdvisor like Betterment. This is typically cheaper than having a traditional advisor.
I was blown away by ideas like outsourcing and geo arbitrage your tasks to someone in a different country when I read The 4-Hour Work Week. By using remote personal assistants you can delegate some tasks to someone. This also sharpens your managerial abilities as you get better at instructing people about what to do and how to do something. Read a summary of the 4-Hour Work Week here.
Helpful Resources
Here are some resources that can help you manage your tasks and time better. These resources include some apps you could use to create your own prioritization hierarchy.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
As mentioned above, this book by Stephen Covey popularized the Eisenhower Matrix. It is a classic productivity book that lays out an approach that can make you a better person at home and work. The principles in the book help you create a structure of how to approach decision-making and time management. It can also help you in understanding how to make the most of opportunities and how to adapt to a changing environment.
TickTick
TickTick is a really great app that is also free. I use it personally for recurring reminders and other tasks. You can create your own lists for separate task types. The app also lets you set priorities for every task.
In order to incorporate the Eisenhower Matrix in TickTick, you can start by creating two types of tags: important and urgent. Add the appropriate tag to each of your tasks based on which quadrant the task belongs to.
The main advantage of using an app like TickTick over pen and paper is that you can filter all your tasks by tag. This is especially useful if you have a long list of tasks. There are many other to-do apps out there that can help you achieve the same result. I have found TickTick to be the best out of the innumerable apps I have tried.
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Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Framework
The foundations of the method reach back to US president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was famous for his outstanding productivity. In a speech he once said “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
This is a common pattern. Think about it for a second. Of all the things you do, how much is urgent? And how much is really important? Important as in “this will help me achieve my long-term goals”. Urgency is loud. It demands focus – takes focus away from other things that might actually be more important.
Steven R. Covey and the Four Quadrants of Time Management
Eisenhower Matrix App Android
Later these two dimensions, urgency, and importance, were used to create a 2x2 Time Management Matrix. It was most famously popularized by Stephen R. Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
Quadrant I: Important and Urgent
The top left quadrant screams emergency. Things that cannot be put off. Things that will lead to bad outcomes if ignored. Some examples:
- Finish that budget presentation that is due tomorrow
- Complete your taxes that are due this week
- Fix the water leak
- Extinguish the literal fire
Quadrant II: Important, but not urgent
Many important tasks are actually not that time-critical. They are important because they bring you closer to your goals or improve your well-being. If you don’t do them it will have a profoundly negative impact. But whether you do them now or later does not make much of a difference – provided you do them at all. A few examples:
- All kinds of planning
- Exercise
- That presentation that is due next month
- Downtime
Note that one and the same task can move from Quadrant II to Quadrant I of the Time Management Matrix just by letting time pass. Finishing the presentation that you are going to hold next month is not urgent today. But it will be one month from now. This is how many people get stuck in a fire extinguisher mode. It’s a vicious cycle of focusing on the urgent tasks, not having time to do the important non-urgent task until those become urgent emergency themselves. Rinse, repeat.
Quadrant III: Urgent, but not important
The devil’s quadrant. These tasks feel important because they are urgent, but they aren’t actually that important. They might be necessary, but they aren’t the things that significantly impact your future. They won’t bring you closer to your goals. For example:
- Meetings
- Responding to emails
- Interruptions
Quadrant IV: Not urgent, not important
Activities in the fourth quadrant are time wasters. Still, they manage to creep up. They could be:
- Checking social media
- Busywork
- Finding that perfect filing system although the current one works well
How to Use the Time Management Matrix
Your goal should be to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II: Important, but not urgent tasks. These are the activities that will bring you closer to your goals. They let you proactively plan your life instead of just having to react to urgent matters.
Avoid spending too much time in Quadrant I (important and urgent) of the Time Management Matrix. These things are important, but constantly putting out fires will leave you stressed and at risk for burnout. You will have to find a way to handle them in Quadrant II before they become urgent. Also avoid spending too much time in Quadrant III (urgent but not important). Otherwise, you will develop a short-term focus and your life seems out of your control. If Quadrant IV (neither important nor urgent) takes up too much of your time, you are basically living irresponsibly and unsustainably.
To focus on Quadrant II, you will need to reduce the time you spend in other quadrants. Begin by minimizing Quadrants III and IV. For Quadrant III activities, ask yourself if they need to be done at all. They are not that important, so maybe it’s all right to just not do them at all. Another common strategy, especially for senior business people, is to delegate these activities to someone else. As for Quadrant IV: Just drop it. It’s neither important nor urgent - why do it at all? Stop idly surfing the web or organizing things that don’t need organizing.
As you invest the time that you recovered from Quadrants III and IV into Quadrant II (important but not urgent) you will spend less and less time in Quadrant I of the Time Management Matrix. You now have time for strategic work, for creating good plans, so your efforts are better targeted. You can take care of important things before they become urgent.
The Time Management Matrix + The 4Ds of Time Management
Another popular time management strategy is the 4Ds of Time Management. Each D stands for:
- Do
- Defer (as in schedule for later)
- Delegate
- Delete / Drop
This maps nicely onto the four quadrants of the Time Management Matrix:
- Quadrant I: Important and urgent => Do right away
- Quadrant II: Important, not urgent => Defer / Schedule when you are going to do it
- Quadrant III: Not important but urgent => Delegate to someone else
- Quadrant IV: Neither important nor urgent => Drop it
An App to Focus on Quadrant II
Our time management app Focality helps you to give Quadrant II the attention it deserves. Use Focality to establish a planning habit and proactively form your life. Your important goals each have their own section in your plans. This makes it easy to schedule the important tasks that might otherwise be drowned in the noise of screaming urgent tasks.
Focality also gives you the tools to constantly improve your process. Reflect on your plans and learn from data-driven insights.