The Eisenhower Matrix – Decision-making in the White House

Somewhere in your life there exists a list of all the stuff you’ve got to do this week. Some of it probably lives safely in your head – I doubt, for example, you forget to brush your teeth. Some of it probably lives at work, and I bet most of that is just in your email inbox.

But I bet there’s a bunch of stuff you know you should do, you want to do, you feel you have to do, that’s bobbing up and down in your brain like a determined poop in the proverbial U-bend.

If we don’t have a system for organising all these little jobs, we end up firefighting or procrastinating; doing the jobs for the people screaming the loudest, or doing the stuff that feels like work, because it ticks a box but doesn’t actually affect anything… like convincing Google you’re not a robot, 30 seconds after it asked the last time.

And thus, Eisenhower and his matrix.

General Dwight D Eisenhower, or Ike, as he would come to be nicknamed, was the 34th President of the United States. He was the third of seven sons, all of whom were called Ike. Dwight was Big Ike, his younger brother Edgar was Little Ike. But by the end of World War II, only the General would continue to be called Ike.

A Republican from humble beginnings, he wasn’t a gifted academic, at least not to begin with. He consistently finished towards the bottom end of rankings at university, but would go on to excel, especially when it came to military strategy.

The “matrix” idea all stems from a speech he gave in 1954 to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches. These mad lads got to hear the basis of an idea that would be extended by Stephen Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Now, my friends of this convocation, there is another thing we can hope to learn from your being with us. I illustrate it by quoting the statement of a former college president, and I can understand the reason for his speaking as he did. I am sure President Miller can.

This President said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Now this, I think, represents a dilemma of modern man. Your being here can help place the important before us, and perhaps even give the important the touch of urgency.

And that’s it. The rest comes from Stephen Covey, and the idea goes like this.

You draw two lines on a piece of paper – a horizontal one and a vertical one – so you can divide the paper up into four quarters.

This also creates two axes: a horizontal one which we can label “Urgency”, and a vertical one we can label “Importance”. So now our quadrants contain space for four different categories of task:

A grid of four squares, labeled "Urgent and important", "Important but not urgent", "Urgent πbut not important", and "Neither urgent nor important"

Now imagine your tasks for the week. Where do they go? If they’re anything like the tasks the rest of us are dealing with, they’ll be all over the map, but most of the tasks you’ll actually get done will come from the “Urgent” half of our grid. Because that’s the stuff that screams the loudest… the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

But meanwhile, all those other tasks – those important, maybe long-term, less sexy or less immediately-gratifying tasks – get bumped to tomorrow and then the next day and then the day after and on and on until you surrender to the fact you’ll never actually do All the Things.

So, given we can’t get it all done, we have to make some tough decisions, and take a longer view. Because, if we spend all our time in the left half of the grid, we end up on a hamster wheel, spinning and spinning and only taking care of the present. But if we rotate our focus 90 degrees, we can begin to think about what’s important, not just what’s urgent.

Focusing on what's important

If your house is full of manga from the 1980s, tidying them up and getting your space back is important. But it only becomes urgent if you’re flying to Japan and you can’t find your passport.

If you have a blog about your travels in Japan and the website goes down, that’s an urgent problem. But unless that blog is about how to keep websites from crashing, it’s probably not important, so you shouldn’t be spending undue time on it.

So often though, it’s those sorts of problems that end up hijacking our day. So the Eisenhower Matrix exists to help us put these sorts of problems into buckets. These buckets map directly onto our four quadrants.

The “Do it now” bucket is for those jobs that are both important and urgent. I need to catch this flight, but I can’t find my passport because it’s buried under piles of Japanese comics.
The “Do it later” bucket is for jobs that are important, but there’s no time pressure. Like learning how to say “Can I use your bathroom?” in Japanese.
The “Delegate it” bucket is for the stuff that needs to be taken care of now, but doesn’t define you… like fixing your broken website. If you work for your self, do you really want to spend your billable hours fiddling with WordPress, or would it be better to pay someone to sort it out, so you can get back to the stuff you can invoice for?
The “Delete it” bucket is for stuff that’s neither urgent, nor important. In the grand scheme of things, it’s stuff that just doesn’t need doing. Like finding exactly the right shade of red for the icon of your travel blog, it doesn’t need to be done now, and it’s not actually going to impact anything.

How to evaluate the importance of a task

First off, remember you’re not responsible for how other people manage their time. Their disorganisation is not your problem, so you get to make your own judgement. That doesn’t mean you can be an officious jerk about it, but you can calmly explain that your plate is full right now, and you’ll get to their thing as soon as you can.

If it’s your own stuff you’re trying to categorise, try and think about it in the long term. Will the thing on your list actually improve your situation, or might it just be busy work? Is picking the right digital camera more important than learning the basics of how to compose a shot?

But don’t discount your hobbies in all of this. Don’t think that just because there isn’t an ultimate end goal that an activity isn’t important. You might want to learn to sing but have no intention of performing outside of the monthly office karaoke. But if something is genuinely important to you and it’ll be important to you in a few months’ time, keep it on the list. On the other hand, if it really doesn’t get you anywhere and it doesn’t recharge your batteries, get rid of it.

But that’s easy enough to say if you live in a world where you have a virtual assistant on tap that you can throw jobs at. Most of us don’t, so we have to make a tougher call.

Bottom line: if a job needs doing but you’re not the best person for it, if you can afford to pay someone to do it, do it. They’ll do it better, in less time, and hopefully with less stress.

If you can’t afford to pay someone, aim for the bare minimum. Let’s say it’s your website. It’s gone down and you can’t afford to pay someone to figure it out. What would be the quickest way to get something up so that when someone clicks through from Google, they don’t see an error message?

It doesn’t have to be a long-term fix. Maybe you can Sellotape something together until you find a more permanent solution. And you might even find that later down the line, that temporary fix is holding up just fine.

Examples of the Eisenhower Matrix in the real world

Important and urgent jobs could be paying overdue bills, fixing a broken pipe, buying food when you’ve run out, or getting to a job interview.
Important but not urgent jobs would be things like household chores, planning your weekly meals, getting exercise, and chilling out.
Urgent but not important jobs include dealing with social media notifications or answering phone calls when you should be relaxing, or running an errand for a friend while you should be at work.
Jobs that are neither urgent nor important include doomscrolling social media, browsing Amazon for deals on things you don’t need, or watching Love Island.

Putting the Eisenhower Matrix into practice

I’m going to assume you have all your todos in an app, where you can tag them and put dates against them. If you’re a paper person, this is going to take a bit longer.

If you can, set an urgency score and importance score for each of the jobs you’ve got on for this week. For bonus points, order them so the most important and most urgent come first, and then scroll right down to the bottom and look at the dregs. Ask yourself

Does this need to be done?
Would it be a really good use of my time?
Would doing it make my life more comfortable or more fun?

If you answered “no” to two of these questions, you have my permission to scrub it from your list, and replace it with something that’ll actually make your life better.

Life runs a lot smoother when you mix up the things you have to do with the things you want to do. So give yourself a bit of time today to go through your list. Figure out what needs doing now, what you can do later, what could be done better by someone else, and what ain’t never gettin’ done.

Does this system work for you?

Some questions to consider when adding this to your own personal productivity plan:

Can you see yourself plotting out your week’s tasks and categorising them in terms of urgency and importance?
Does it fit with the way you currently handle your todo list?
Will it save you time, or is it just procrastination by productivity?