“Especially when our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future…The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Eisenhower Matrix is a time-management strategy that helps you determine which tasks should be prioritized, delegated, scheduled for later – or not done at all. The framework helps us overcome biases by rationally categorizing our tasks by urgency and importance.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a four-category tool, with two columns and two rows. The columns are labeled ‘urgent’ and ‘not urgent’, and the rows are labeled ‘important’ and ‘not important’.
Urgent – require your immediate attention and put you in a hurried state, generating stress.
Important – help you achieve long-term goals – which first requires you to figure out your own goals.
Quadrants determine how to process tasks
Urgent & Important = Complete immediately
These must be done now, have clear consequences, and affect your long-term goals.
Not Urgent & Important = Scheduled
These affect your long-term goals but don’t need to be done right away. These tasks are scheduled after you tackle the tasks in the first quadrant.
Urgent & Unimportant = Delegate
These tasks must be completed now, but don’t affect your long-term goals. Delegating tasks is one of the most efficient ways to manage your workload and give your team the opportunity to expand their skill set.
Not Urgent & Unimportant = Delete
Distractions that are getting in the way of you accomplishing your goals.
Benefits and Challenges
Benefits of the Eisenhower Decision Matrix:
- provides a quick and easy, yet consistent method for evaluating options
- prioritize complex or unclear issues
- adaptable to many contexts like projects, work, personal, etc.
While identifying urgency is easy, categorizing importance is hard. Labeling tasks as “Not Important” can be difficult, particularly if it was delegated to you by a superior. Cross-referencing against long-term goals helps to clarify precedence.
The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a simplistic yet efficient manner to sort through your workload and focus on meaningful work.