The Eisenhower Matrix: stop letting urgent things crowd out important ones

The Eisenhower Matrix sorts your tasks by importance and urgency into four boxes: Do First (important and urgent), Schedule (important but not yet urgent), Delegate (urgent but not important) and Eliminate (neither). It's named after a remark President Dwight Eisenhower quoted in a 1954 speech, and Stephen Covey turned the idea into the grid most of us know in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989.

Why does a whole year pass without the important things moving?

Urgent things are loud. Emails, phone calls, someone at your desk with a quick question, a deadline tomorrow morning: they all demand your attention right now, and they usually get it.

Important things tend to wait patiently in the background. Your health, the plan you keep meaning to write, the conversation with your daughter about university. They'll wait for months, sometimes years, without ever making a fuss.

And because urgent work is always there, right in front of you, the important things only really happen when you decide to put them first. Most of us know this perfectly well and still find, come December, that the things we cared about most are exactly where we left them in January.

Where does the Eisenhower Matrix come from?

In August 1954, President Eisenhower spoke to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. During that speech he quoted a "former college president" who had said, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

So the famous line wasn't originally Eisenhower's, and he never drew the grid that now carries his name.

That came from Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989. His "time management matrix" is the version almost everyone uses today. Covey argued that most of us spend far too much time on things that are both urgent and important, and far too little on the important things that aren't yet urgent, which is where most of the meaningful work in a life tends to live.

How does the Eisenhower Matrix work in PiViva?

It fills itself in, which means there's nothing extra to keep up to date. Every action in PiViva can be rated for importance and urgency, and the matrix reads those ratings and sorts each action into its box.

Do First holds the things that are both important and urgent. Schedule holds the things that are important but not yet urgent, and that's where most of your meaningful work belongs. Delegate holds the things that are urgent but not especially important, which often describes a fair bit of what arrives in your inbox. And Eliminate holds the things that are neither, which you can usually let go of.

In this matrix a falling score is a good sign, because your score is the share of actions sitting in Do First. If you watch it come down over a few months, it means you're catching things before they turn into emergencies.

A helpful question for the Delegate box is whether the task really has to be you. It's often quicker to do something yourself this once, but handing it to someone else properly means you won't have to do it next time either, and that time comes back to you again and again.

What if everything feels urgent?

That's a very common feeling, and it's often a sign that some of those things are less urgent than they seem. A gentle way to test it is to ask what would actually happen if a task waited until Thursday. If the honest answer is "not much", it probably belongs in Schedule or Delegate.

The same ratings also feed the Action Priority Matrix, which looks at impact against effort, and the two together give you a clearer picture than either one alone.

If something important keeps being pushed back, you can protect time for it in the Weekly Success Planner, and when you sit down to do it, a Pomodoro Timer will help you stay with it. A quick look at your Eisenhower Matrix once a week is usually enough to keep the important things moving, and to give them the place in your life they deserve. Over time you may find that fewer things turn into emergencies, and that the year ends with the important things done.