Eisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower Matrix

“Whats important is not urgent and whats urgent is not important” - Dwight Eisenhower

Here’s the problem with creating to-do lists: there’s no priority in sequence. In a to-do list, our goal is to get rid of the pending tasks as soon as possible. But, by using to-do lists you would never get around to the important tasks.

Deciding a level of importance for each task you have allows you to quickly organize which to do first, and which not to do at all.

Urgent tasks are those that need to be dealt with immediately. We react to a situation and must resolve a problem right away. Urgent tasks are things that you feel like you need to react to: emails, phone calls, texts, news stories.

Meanwhile, Important tasks are things that contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals. Important tasks, on the other hand, are crucial to a long-term goal. They may or may not need to be handled right away, but if we want to improve in an area, we should be focusing on what’s important.

Unfortunately, we often end up working on tasks that fall more into the urgent category than the important category. The Eisenhower Matrix prevents this from happening by keeping our priorities focused. Separating these differences is simple enough to do once, but doing so continually can be tough. Eisenhower Matrix provides a clear framework for making the decisions over and over again. And like anything in life, consistency is the hard part.

Sort out the tasks in order of importance. One useful tool for doing so is the Eisenhower Matrix. The principle behind the Eisenhower Matrix is that we should separate tasks that are important from those that are urgent.

Using the decision matrix below, you will separate your actions based on four possibilities.

1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

Here is a sample:

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	Write program for today	Exercise
Not important	Schedule meetings	Go through emails and messages

Ideally, you should just have one or two activities in the top left quadrant that you absolutely must do during the day. For the activities in the top right quadrant, it’s important to schedule them so that you don’t keep putting these things off.

The great thing about this matrix is that it can be used for broad productivity plans (“How should I spend my time each week?”) and for smaller, daily plans (“What should I do today?”).

Eisenhower Matrix is particularly useful because it pushes us to question whether an action is really necessary, which means we are more likely to move tasks to the “Delete” quadrant rather than mindlessly repeating them. And, if you simply eliminated all of the things you waste time on each day then you probably wouldn’t need any tips on how to be more productive at the things that matter.

There are two questions that can help clarify the entire process behind the Eisenhower Box. Those two questions are

1. What am I working toward?
2. What are the core values that drive my life?

Deciding which tasks to do and which tasks to delete becomes much easier when you are clear about what is important to you. Make hard decisions and delete any task that does not lead you toward your mission, your values, and your goals.

It is a useful decision-making tool for increasing productivity and eliminating the behaviors that take up mental energy, waste time, and rarely move us toward out goals.