Prioritize Tasks With the Eisenhower Matrix

You already know that scheduling your tasks – whether it’s time-boxing , task-packing , or whole-day theming – is a top priority when it comes to being productive and getting things done. But when you have a bunch of tasks and don’t even know where to start by prioritizing them, you need an efficient method to decide what to get right into action, what to delegate, and what to forget. Let’s see how the Eisenhower Matrix can help you figure it all out.

What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

This assessment and performance tool is named after former President Dwight Eisenhower, who once quoted Dr. J. Roscoe Miller as saying, “I have two kinds of problems: urgent and important. The urgent is not important, and the important is never urgent.” My apologies to Dr. Miller, but a more famous person has been honored to name this system after himself.

When using the Eisenhower Matrix, you draw a standard matrix with two intersecting lines forming four quadrants. The x-axis represents urgency and the y-axis represents importance, so the top left quadrant will show you tasks that are both urgent and important; in the upper right quadrant are non-urgent but important tasks; the lower left quadrant is for unimportant but urgent tasks; and the lower right quadrant contains tasks that are neither urgent nor important. It looks like this:

How to use the matrix

You can create your own matrix on paper, or with software like draw.io , or even specialized services like eisenhower.me . Then simply insert your tasks into the matrix, sorting them by combination of urgency and importance. The real key is what you do next.

According to productivity giant Asana , the quadrants have secondary purposes beyond determining what is urgent or important: the top left quadrant is for tasks you should buckle up and get done now, and the top right quadrant is for tasks you need to schedule to be done in soon. future. At the bottom, the left quadrant represents tasks that you need to delegate to someone capable, while the right quadrant shows you tasks that you can simply delete or postpone.

Once you see all your responsibilities in the matrix, delegate the urgent and unimportant and schedule the important but not urgent, and then move on to your urgent tasks in the upper right quadrant. If the deadline is seriously approaching, do this first before worrying about delegation or scheduling. This visual representation of how important and urgent each duty is can help you figure out what to devote your time to instead of wasting time panicking about how much you think you should get done.