The Eisenhower Matrix

The problem it solves

Most working days are organised by urgency. The work with a deadline, a person waiting or a notification attached gets done first, and the work with none of those gets pushed to later. That usually feels like prioritising and it's often closer to the opposite, because urgency is a fact about timing and says little about how much a piece of work matters.

The two get confused because urgent work arrives with its own reminder. Nobody sends a message asking why you haven't yet started the thing that would make next quarter easier, so the work that matters most and has no deadline tends to lose to anything that has one. It loses a day at a time, and each individual choice looks perfectly reasonable when it's made.

The pull is stronger than people expect. Given a choice between two tasks, people tend to take the one with the nearer deadline even when they know the other one pays more.

The idea

The matrix separates two questions that people usually answer together. Is this urgent, meaning does it need doing soon? And is it important, meaning does it contribute to something you or your team are trying to achieve? Cross the two and a list sorts into four piles, each with a different response.

The name comes from a remark Dwight Eisenhower made in a speech at Evanston, Illinois, in August 1954, which he credited to an unnamed former college president. Nobody has identified who that was.

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

He drew no matrix, and there's little evidence he ran his diary by one. The two-by-two form was popularised by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, and the Eisenhower name was attached to it later. It's worth knowing mainly because it tells you what kind of thing this is, which is a teaching device built on a good line rather than a method anybody tested.

Enlarge: Urgent work expands, and what it expands into is the work with no deadline to defend it.

A two-by-two grid, urgent on the left and not urgent on the right, important on top. The quadrants are labelled do, schedule, delegate and drop. A dashed line marks where an even split would sit, and the real dividing line has been pushed well to the right of it, so the urgent quadrants are wide and schedule, holding planning, learning and prevention, is squeezed narrow and marked as squeezed.

Urgent work expands, and what it expands into is the work with no deadline to defend it.Close

Urgent work expands, and what it expands into is the work with no deadline to defend it.

Urgent and important, so do it. Real deadlines, crises and problems that will be worse tomorrow. Some of this is unavoidable, and a good share of it is important work from the next quadrant that waited until it became urgent.

Important and not urgent, so schedule it. Planning, learning, building relationships, fixing the cause of a recurring problem, and having the conversation before it turns into a difficult one. No deadline forces any of it onto today, which is why it's the quadrant that gets squeezed and the one the whole matrix exists to protect.

Urgent and not important, so delegate it, or batch it, shrink it or push back on it. A lot of interruptions, meetings and requests live here. They're urgent to somebody, and the useful question is whether they need doing by you, now, at the length they're asking for.

Neither, so drop it. Busywork, habitual checking and tasks that have survived because the question of why they exist hasn't come up.

The squeeze is the mechanism worth understanding. Urgent work expands to fill the day, and what it expands into is the important and not urgent quadrant, since that's the one with no deadline to defend it. Left long enough, the neglected work comes back as urgent, the top-left grows, and the squeeze gets tighter.

The matrix is a personal tool, and it asks about importance in the sense of contribution to goals. Burning fires asks a sharper version of the same question for a team's shared queue, where what breaks if the work is left alone is easier to agree on than whose goals it serves.

How to use it

Take this week's list and place each item, asking the two questions separately and importance first. Asking about urgency first tends to colour the answer about importance, since anything with a deadline feels as though it must matter.

Judge importance against something written down, such as your objectives, what your manager has said this quarter is for, or what you'd want to be able to point to in six months' time. Importance judged by feel in the moment usually turns out to be urgency again. The experiments on urgency found that reminding people what each task was worth, at the moment they chose, was enough to stop the nearer deadline winning, so a line next to each item saying what it's for does more work than it looks.

Then act on the quadrants in an unusual order. Book time in the calendar for the important and not urgent items before the week fills, because they'll lose any open competition for it. Look hard at the urgent and not important items and ask what the smallest acceptable response is, which might be a shorter reply, a later one or a question about whether it's needed at all. Drop what's in the last quadrant deliberately, and tell anybody who was expecting it.

If you've nobody to delegate to, which is the normal position early in a career, the third quadrant becomes a negotiation rather than a handover. Batching requests into one slot a day, asking the requester for the real deadline, and asking your manager which of two things they'd rather you did are all versions of delegating, with the decision going upwards instead of the work going down.

Revisit the placement each week. Items move, and the one worth watching is anything that's been in the schedule quadrant for a month with no time booked against it.

Where it breaks down

Every concept here has one. It is the section most summaries leave out.

Importance is hard to judge in the moment, so urgency wins anyway. The matrix assumes you can tell what's important while the urgent thing is in front of you, and that's when people are worst at it. Without goals written down to check against, the importance axis quietly collapses into urgency and the grid stops sorting anything.

Delegate assumes somebody to delegate to. The quadrant was written with a manager's authority in mind. A junior member of a team usually has nobody below them, and for them delegating means negotiating, declining or deferring, which carries a social cost the diagram doesn't show.

Under pressure, the whole list drifts into the top-left. Items get promoted to urgent and important, often honestly, because the people asking for them say so. A grid with most of the list in one quadrant has stopped doing any work, and it's easy to miss, because the ritual of sorting still takes place.

It sorts a list and says nothing about capacity. A week with twelve urgent and important items and time for six has a resourcing problem, and the matrix will present it as a prioritisation problem you've failed to solve. The honest move at that point is to take the list to whoever sets the priorities, rather than to sort it again.

The history is looser than the name, and so is the evidence. Eisenhower said something like it, credited somebody else and didn't draw the grid. The pull the matrix targets is well evidenced, since people choose urgent tasks over more valuable ones even when they know the payoffs. Whether using the matrix changes that has little direct evidence behind it, and research on time-management practice in general finds clearer effects on how in control people feel than on how well they perform.

In one line

Ask whether something matters separately from whether it's due, and book time for the work that matters and isn't due, because nothing else will.