The urgent-important matrix: manage your time like a President
Library → Models and frameworks → The Eisenhower urgent/important matrix
"Who's got the time?" Ever found yourself asking this question? Then this guide is for you.
You're about to discover an ingenious method for organizing your time and tasks, all thanks to the 34th U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His secret weapon? The Eisenhower Matrix, a two-by-two task-taming time machine.
The famous urgent-important matrix, inspired by President Eisenhower.
The basics of the urgent/important matrix
Behold the 2 x 2 square above or better yet, grab a pen and paper and sketch one out (preferably with some Presidential vigour). Label the two columns: "Urgent" and "Not Urgent", and the two rows: "Important" and "Not Important". Voila, you have your very own Eisenhower Matrix!
Now you can put all your responsibilities or to-dos
Do the critical tasks: urgent and important things
This quadrant contains critical work with tight deadlines that contribute significantly towards your goals. This box is like a sizzling pot on the stove – it requires immediate attention! Think finalizing a project due tomorrow, or dealing with a pipe burst at home.
Schedule the urgent and important things
This quadrant contains your deep work. It might not be urgent, but it’s a treasure chest filled with tasks that matter in the long term even if they lack immediate deadlines. These are your strategic moves, such as planning your career or maintaining your health.
Delegate or automate the urgent but unimportant things
This is the busywork — like unimportant emails or minor requests from colleagues — that yell for attention but don't contribute much to your overall objectives.
Dismiss the non-urgent and unimportant things
In this final quadrant lies your wasteful work – everything that doesn’t matter and doesn’t particularly need to happen anyway. You’ll want to minimise or outright eliminate anything int his quadrant.
Just because it’s urgent, doesn’t mean it’s important.
As Eisenhower explained, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
It’s pretty obvious we need to crack on with our urgent & important critical work, and likewise try to avoid wasteful work. But the real benefit comes from adjusting the balance between the other two boxes: spending more time on impactful deep work, even if there’s no deadline, and reducing our focus on busywork, which feels demanding but isn’t really very important.
As a President, it’s easy to simply ‘delegate’ busywork to a highly qualified White House aide. For the rest of us, we may need to adopt some additional strategies to reduce our time there.
Although the Eisenhower matrix can be used to assess individual tasks on a to-do list, you can also use it to look at your working life (and personal life) more generally.
📦 Keep busywork in its box
Time-boxing is a good way to manage our balance of tasks. A common recommendation is to devote specific time on your calendar to focusing on ‘deep work’, like planning or strategising, during which you brook no interruptions and focus on the task at hand. (One name for such a sprint is an “Eisenhower Hour.”)
But why let unimportant requests run roughshod over the rest of your schedule, while limiting your important tasks to an hour? A more powerful approach is to devote specific time on your calendar to managing busywork, and devote the entire rest of your time to focusing on things that really matter.
🔌 Unplug where possible
Busywork reaches us via notifications, pings, and other kinds of digital interruption. But few of us optimise these tools to work for us. For instance, you can turn off channel messages that don’t directly mention you, turn off email notifications in favour of checking your email at specific times of day, and so on.
Even seeing incoming requests exacts a cognitive load that distracts you from deep work (even if you have the conviction to delay replying until later) so resist the urge to be constantly updated about unimportant matters.
🦸🏻 Have the courage to respond your way
If you’re used to responding to purportedly-urgent interruptions right away, the idea of letting things slide might seem scary or even rude. And if you have reputation for responsiveness, changing your habits might require a bit of finesse.
Ask your manager: Some teams lack common norms for communication and responsiveness. Just ask! “I want to really focus on A, B and C, so I don’t want to spend more than 20% of my time on the other stuff – does it seem reasonable if I just devote an hour each day responding to requests?” It’s good to know they have your back.
Be quietly assertive: You’re going to need to politely and warmly say no, or at least ‘not now.’ No need to grovel: a decline, reason and opportunity to re-ask can be tweet length. “I’m working on building X so won’t get to this until next week – but let me know if it’s a major emergency.”
Be quick: Senior leaders are famous for brilliantly terse messages, while the rest of us are currently hoping emails find people well, reassuring that it’s ‘no worries if not!’, and so on. Quick messages needn’t be rude - they’re also quick for the other person to read, which respects their time too.
🤷🏻♂️ Figure out what’s important
One seductive element about busywork is it ‘feels’ productive. But really, it can mask the fact that we haven’t figured out what is truly important, or what impact we can really make. So instead, we cultivate a reputation for promptly responding to emails, or chiming in with a cheerful GIF on Slack. This makes us feel responsive, visible and ‘obviously’ active.
Instead, reflect on what tasks are most meaningful – these are often things that you uniquely have the knowledge to accomplish – or consult with your manager and others to get better insight into what matters most.
📆 Use deadlines and sub-tasks for deep work
Even though these tasks are not urgent, setting your own deadlines can instill a sense of urgency, guiding them into the critical work quadrant. Having a clear goal and a timeline creates structure and accountability, pushing you to act.
Similarly, our deep work tasks can often start life as vague, massive to-dos like ‘Develop new business strategy.’ No wonder it’s hard to make a start! Breaking them down into smaller, manageable parts will make it easier to start and complete them. This reduces the sense of being overwhelmed and makes progress visibly recognisable, enhancing motivation.
⚙️ Reflect, delegate, automate, challenge
Take stock on how you’re spending your time and how often you’re in each box.
If you’re a manager, then delegating more work really is an option, giving other staff an opportunity to take on more senior responsibilities. (You can use a model like this famous continuum to decide how much freedom you give your team.)
If there are recurring tasks, is it worth spending some time up-front to automate them or make them easier? It might quickly pay dividends. For instance, if others turn to you to ‘quickly’ pull information from a particular system, you could take the time to train them to do it themselves?
Are all your tasks as important as you once imagined? For instance, if you spend hours creating a detailed monthly report but others don’t really understand it, it might both quicker and more impactful to write a shorter summary email.
Are there standing commitments that no longer make sense? Meetings that once seemed crucial but are now just a default part of the calendar? Look for ‘automatic’ busywork that could be challenged and edited out.
