Setting your long term goals and having a To Do list is a good first step. Next challenge is to prioritize and act on it. Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant helps us identify our next to-do item from the list. Let’s understand and see it in action.
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History and reference
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of USA. In a speech in 1954, he said “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
This made the concept popular and named after him.
Later, this was popularized by author Stephen Covey, in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He discussed about it in details as part of Habit 3: Put first thing first.
What is Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant?
There are multiple names but most popular are Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant. It is also sometimes referred as Urgent-Important Matrix, time management matrix, etc.
It is a task management tool, that prioritizes tasks by urgency and importance. Please note, we said tasks, not goals. Why? Well, you may want to see the difference between Task vs Goals.
It is a matrix, which divide tasks into four quadrants, based on urgency and importance. You can visualize it in the image below.
- The ‘X’ axis (horizontal line), shows the urgency.
- The left part is urgent, and right part is not urgent
- The ‘Y’ axis (vertical line) shows the importance.
- Top part is important, bottom part is not important.
Urgent Vs Important.
Urgent tasks are the tasks, which have a deadline. Important, though don’t have a fixed deadline or deadline in future, are the tasks which help us achieve our actual goals.
The main principle is, we have to do urgent tasks, we should prioritize important task. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense immediately, we will see them with examples.
Understand Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant
As shown in the image above, Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant have four quadrants.
- Quadrant 1: It is top-left part of the matrix, which means it is both urgent and important.
- Quadrant 2: It is top-right part of the matrix, which means it is important, but not urgent.
- Quadrant 3: It is the bottom-left part of the matrix, which is urgent, but not important.
- Quadrant 4: It is the bottom-right part of the matrix, which is neither urgent nor important.
Using Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant
Not we have a quick high-level understanding of urgent vs important and Eisenhower Matrix. Now is the time to understand it in more details with example and apply it.
Quadrant 1
This is also called Focus quadrant, or Do first quadrant, or Do immediately quadrant. As those other names suggest, this is where we need to focus as priority of the day.
There is a famous quote
Work: Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
– Francis of Assisi
Quadrant 1 represent the necessary part of this quote.
So yes, if a thing is both urgent and important, we need to focus there.
However, we also need to understand, if we end up having too many tasks here, we are not planning our tasks better. There are ways, we need to focus more on Quadrant 2, delegate quadrant 3, and learn to Say No to Quadrant 4.
Tasks in Quadrant 1 are mostly (not always) the long ignored tasks of Quadrant 2.
Quadrant 2
For quarter 2, you will see names and advise like Schedule, Decide, Plan and prioritize on this quadrant.
These are the tasks, mostly attached with our long-term goals. Yes, we have time for them, so they are not urgent and this is the reason, they mostly get ignored until the last moment.
In his book 7 habits of highly effective people, author covered it in detail as habit 3. He suggested, we must give our most focus here.
If we fail to focus on quadrant 2, tasks there will either move to quadrant 1 or be part of failed/delayed goals.
One of the ways to make sure we work on important tasks, is Time Boxing the tasks in your calendar.
Quadrant 3
Most common name and advice for quadrant 3 is Delegate.
These are the tasks that have very short deadline, but no or less important towards your long-term goals.
Whenever possible, we must delegate these tasks to someone else. It is not necessary that you have a team working under you to delegate tasks.
Death by thousand cuts: It’s a famous proverb. Take an example of human body. If there are couple of cuts, we might not even notice them. If there are 10-20, the pain will start impacting our daily chores. If there are hundreds, they might not be fatal, but we might need to hospitalize and stop all our work. Thousand cuts, on the other hand could be fatal.
Now consider our main goals as body and quadrant 3 tasks as cuts. Couple of them will not harm. Tens will start bothering us, Hundreds will badly impact them, and Thousands is like killing the main goal.
Stop them at source; Say No or Delegate them.
Quadrant 4
It is wastage of time to even discuss and write about them.
They are neither urgent not important, do we really need to discuss or simply avoid, eliminate, delete, or discard them.
Applying Eisenhower Matrix or Priority Quadrant
Theory is good, but how to apply that? How do we decide which tasks belongs to which quadrant? Well, there is no silver bullet. There could be a task which is in quadrant 1 for you but same task is in quadrant 4 for someone else.
Your goals will decide which quadrant task belongs for you. However, if helps, you may want to check Example Eisenhower Matrix tasks.
This note is part of my overall Life PowerUser series. If this article was helpful to you, you may want to check the whole series.