Framework library · Decision making and problem solving
Eisenhower matrix
The Eisenhower matrix separates two things that are easily confused: how soon something is due and how much it matters. Tasks that are both get done now, and important tasks that are not urgent get scheduled. Urgent tasks that matter less get delegated, and the rest get dropped. The second group is the point: it holds strategy, relationships and prevention, the work that urgent tasks always crowd out.
Use it when
- Your week is full of meetings and requests, and the work that matters most keeps slipping to next week.
- A team lead needs to decide what to hand to whom before a busy period.
- You are new in a role and want to see where your time goes against what the role needs.
- You have just come out of a crisis and need to decide what to pick up first.
Avoid it when
- You are ranking projects or investments. Urgency and importance are too coarse; use a weighted decision matrix or RICE scoring.
- You are agreeing the scope of a release with stakeholders. MoSCoW gives a shared language for what must, should and could be delivered.
- Everything on the list is both urgent and important, as in a live incident. Use the incident or crisis process, not a time management tool.
How to run it
List everything competing for your time
This week's tasks, meetings and requests, including the ones you would rather not write down.
Score urgency
From 1 to 5, by how soon it needs doing; 3 or more counts as urgent. A deadline someone else set makes a task urgent, not necessarily important.
Score importance
From 1 to 5, by how much it moves the goals of your role this year; 3 or more counts as important.
Add the hours
Estimated hours this week, so you can see where the time goes, not only where the tasks are. The bubbles are sized by hours.
Act on each quadrant
Do the urgent and important now. Put the important but not urgent in the diary as fixed blocks. Hand the urgent but less important to someone named. Drop the rest and tell whoever asked.
Check the balance
If the schedule quadrant gets the fewest hours, next month's urgent work is being created now.
Work through it
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Mistakes to avoid
- Treating everything from senior people as important. Importance is about the goals of your role, not who sent the request.
- Putting important work in the schedule quadrant without a time in the diary. It then stays there for months.
- Delegating without a named person and a deadline, which turns delegation into dropping.
- Using it once. The quadrants shift every week, so make it a twenty-minute weekly habit.
Where it comes from
Named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in an address to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Evanston, Illinois on 19 August 1954 quoted a former college president: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." The remark contains no matrix. The two-by-two grid was popularised as the time management matrix in Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Source.
Use it with
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