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Eisenhower Matrix

Drop tasks into urgent/important quadrants, then export the do-now list separately from the delegate-and-drop lists.

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Do it now

0

Urgent and important. Crises and deadlines that have already arrived.

    Schedule it

    0

    Important, not urgent. The work that prevents next month’s crises.

      Delegate it

      0

      Urgent, but not important to you. It needs doing; it does not need you.

        Drop it

        0

        Neither urgent nor important. Say so out loud and stop carrying it.

          0 tasks · 0 urgent and important · 0 scheduled

          Worth noticing

          • Nothing captured yet. Write down what is on your plate, then sort it.

          Frequently asked questions

          The questions people actually ask about this document.

          What is the Eisenhower matrix?
          Two questions asked of every task: is it urgent, and is it important. The answers produce four boxes: do it now, schedule it, delegate it, drop it. The value is not the sorting. It is what the finished board shows you about where your week actually goes.
          What is the difference between urgent and important?
          Urgent means it is making a noise now: a deadline, a ringing phone, somebody waiting. Important means it moves something you actually care about. The two feel identical in the moment, which is the whole problem: urgency is a property of the task, importance is a property of your goals, and only one of them announces itself.
          What if everything really is urgent and important?
          Then either you are in a genuine crisis, which passes, or the top-left box has become a to-do list with a dramatic name, which is the common case. Try the test item by item: if this slipped by a week, what actually breaks? Most tasks survive the question, and the ones that do not are your real quadrant one.
          Why is “important but not urgent” the box that matters?
          Because it is the only quadrant that reduces the others. Planning, maintenance, training, writing things down; none of it is shouting today, and all of it is what stops next month being a crisis. A board with an empty second quadrant is a prediction that the top-left box stays full.
          I have nobody to delegate to. Is that quadrant useless?
          No, it changes meaning. Urgent but not important to you still needs an answer, and without a person the answers are: automate it, do it badly on purpose, batch it into one dull hour a week, or renegotiate who expected it. Dropping the quadrant is how it quietly turns back into quadrant one.
          How often should I redo it?
          Weekly is the rhythm that works, because urgency has a shelf life of about a week: half of today’s quadrant one is next week’s quadrant four. Daily is too often to see a pattern and monthly is too late to act on one. Attach it to something that already happens, or it will not happen.
          How is this different from a to-do list?
          A to-do list answers “what is left?”. This answers “what should not be on the list at all?”. The two quadrants a list cannot express are delegate and drop, and those are the ones that make a week lighter. If your board has nothing in either, you have drawn a to-do list in four pieces.
          Did Eisenhower invent this?
          Not the grid. In a 1954 speech he quoted an unnamed university president on having two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, and noted that the urgent are seldom important. The 2×2 drawn from that idea was popularised much later, most widely by Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989.

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