Productivity Series [Part 3]: The Eisenhower Matrix Can Help Prioritize Tasks
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In case you’ve missed it, we’re doing a series on productivity methods. Our last article was focused on the 3/3/3 Method. I hope you’ll check it out. The idea behind the 3/3/3 Method is to spend 3 hours on your most important task, complete 3 shorter tasks that are also important, and the end with 3 maintenance tasks.
The key to understanding the 3/3/3 Method is knowing what’s important. And that can be a challenge if you don’t know how and what to prioritize. So today, I want to talk about priorities.
The Eisenhower Matrix is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States. The matrix has two axes: urgent/important and four quadrants: do, plan, delegate, and delete. This is where it becomes helpful to remember what urgent and important mean.
Urgent means requiring immediate action or attention.
Important means of great significance or value.
The Eisenhower Matrix assigns an action based on whether a task is urgent and/or important. For instance:
DELETE – Tasks that are both unimportant and not urgent should be deleted. This is going to vary depending on your position, but an example of a time-wasting activity might be reading some categories of email.
DELEGATE – Tasks that are urgent but not necessarily important could be delegated or assigned to someone else. Maybe you don’t have someone you can “delegate” to per se but it’s possible that tasks could be reassigned because it is urgent.
PLAN – We can have things that are important to us but not necessarily urgent. For example, strategic planning is important but not necessarily urgent (because we have it on the calendar to do once a year).
DO – This is for tasks that are both important and urgent. Common examples could be an internal crisis or a project with an upcoming deadline.
I see the Eisenhower Matrix being helpful in asking the questions “Is it important?” and “is it urgent?” When we have multiple things on our to-do list, this can help us prioritize and get things done. Teams could use the matrix to make sure that everyone is aware of priorities. I’ve worked on teams before where some people didn’t realize that something was urgent and as soon as they did, they were able to support the team at a higher level.
The downside of the Eisenhower Matrix can be that some less urgent and less important tasks get pushed down on the to-do list (and possibly forgotten). Depending on the task, this could create an emergency later. One of the examples that comes to mind is computer software updates. If we push them off, that might be fine for a few days or maybe even a week. But if we keep pushing them off, there’s a chance that we’ll end up with a computer problem which could cost money and create delays.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a good way to keep track of what’s important and urgent to get done. Even if you only use it to establish priorities and then shift to a different model like the 3/3/3 or Pomodoro Technique to work on the actual task. There’s no rule that says you have to use one productivity tool and only one. That’s the whole purpose of this series, find what works best for you and your situation.
Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby somewhere off the coast of Miami, FL
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