The Eisenhower Priority Matrix

How many upcoming tasks, responsibilities, meetings, conversations, projects etc. would you have if you listed them all out? How many things do you have to do? Think about it for a second and you’ll realise that this is a huge question!

For most people in the world, their complete list of upcoming and potential tasks and responsibilities is essentially endless. There is so much that needs our attention and concentration – how are meant to work out what to prioritise?

This was a question that certainly troubled Dwight D. Eisenhower – Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the middle of WWII and former US President. As the overall Allied commander during D-day – the largest amphibious invasion undertaken in history – Eisenhower had to preside over a nearly unimaginable level of structural complexity which would make anyone’s head spin.

How on earth does a single person deal with this volume of responsibilities? Speaking in 1954, Eisenhower quoted a line which in its simplicity, truth and elegance still echoes today: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

It’s hard to imagine dealing with the level of responsibility that Eisenhower had to contend with, but despite that, his line about the distinction between urgent and important problems still rings true to nearly everyone, no matter their place in the world. We can all relate our own problems to how relatively urgent or important they are to us and therefore gain some understanding as to how to prioritise these problems and tasks.

Fifty years after Eisenhower’s original quote, his basic idea expanded into a prioritisation system with many variants and readings. A version of this system (under the subject line “Put First Things First”) was also popularised in the best-selling business book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.

Even with the different versions of this system, the central basics now generally remain the same: you plot out a square divided into four quadrants. The four quadrants are labelled:

• Important | Urgent

• Important | Not Urgent

• Not Important | Urgent

• Not Important | Not Urgent

By using this simple matrix, you can quite quickly and easily plot out your upcoming problems and tasks, and, most importantly, immediately categorise any new ones which come up. Here are some examples of ways you might categorise some common ones:

• Paying your energy bill due at the end of the month: Important | Not Urgent
  It’s critical to pay your bill to avoid a late fee and/or energy cutoff but you have some time to sort out payment.

• Receiving the buzz of a text from a colleague while you are having dinner with your family: Not Important | Urgent
  The phone buzzing has a sense of urgency, but the vast majority of the time it’s more important to enjoy time with your family rather than interrupt it by pulling out your phone.

• Getting treatment for a cut on a rusty piece of metal: Important | Urgent
  You should get treatment for the cut as soon as you can – if it gets infected you could become extremely sick.

• You are teaching yourself to play a musical instrument: Important | Not Urgent
  Learning an instrument is a fantastic skill to have. There’s no pressing deadline to do so, but if you want to it could help you have a happier and more fulfilling life.

• Reading through your company’s internal weekly newsletter: Not Important | Not Urgent
  Depending on the newsletter, there probably isn’t any important or time pressing information contained in it.

• Doing your income tax return after EOFY: Important | Not Urgent
  You should give a lot of attention to your tax return in case you can get any taxes paid back or if you have any money owing to the government – however you should have plenty of time to get your return right.

• Seeing a new story from your favourite news site pop-up while you are working: Not Important | Urgent
  Although the new story might be on some time-sensitive news, it’s better to stay in your workflow groove as you can still read the story later.

With this simple structure, you can start to order the endless list of tasks you have coming up. Once you’re able to put some order behind this list, you can realise what needs to be done ASAP (Urgent & Important), what needs to have specific time put aside in the future (Important but Not Urgent), what can be dealt with in the near future if you have some spare time (Urgent but Not Important) and what can be dropped completely (Not Urgent & Not Important).

Although extremely useful, The Eisenhower Matrix (or whatever you want to call this type of system) is obviously not a one-stop solution to improving your time management. An obvious issue which frustrates the seeming simplicity of the system is how to categorise certain problems or events. For example, let’s say you are spending some important quality time with your family, but you then receive a phone call from your boss. Which of these is more important to concentrate on? I would like to say it’s obviously your family… but what if putting off the call from your boss reduces your chance of a promotion and an increased wage… which would have helped you to spend more quality time with your family in the future! Life is full of these conundrums and unfortunately I can’t provide the answers to them.

When categorising tasks, it’s up to each of us to personally decide just how important and how urgent different responsibilities are to us – it won’t be the same for everyone. What the Eisenhower Matrix does do is allow us a framework to make these decisions around. Also, by forcing us to consciously consider how important each problem or responsibility is to us, it encourages us to be mindful, less reactive and more purposeful in how to manage the time we have.