Decisions
20 min

Eisenhower matrix

Sort commitments by urgency against importance to decide what gets done, scheduled, delegated or dropped.

Time cost
20 min
Output
Four lists with an action attached to each.
Steps
5

Use when

  • You are overloaded and cannot tell what to work on next.
  • Work you consider important never starts, while urgent work always does.
  • You need to hand work to other people and cannot decide which.

Do not use when

  • You are choosing between options rather than sequencing work you have already committed to. This sorts a list; it does not make a choice.
  • Everything is genuinely urgent, which is a capacity problem rather than a sorting problem.

Inputs required

  • A complete list of commitments
  • A definition of important that is not just “urgent”

Procedure

  1. 01

    List everything

    One list, nothing held mentally. Incomplete lists produce confident sorting of the wrong set.

  2. 02

    Define important

    Write what important means here before sorting: what does it move? If the definition is missing, important collapses into urgent and the matrix produces one quadrant.

  3. 03

    Score both axes

    Urgent means time-sensitive — a deadline exists and moves. Important means it changes an outcome you care about. They are independent.

  4. 04

    Act per quadrant

    Urgent and important: now. Important, not urgent: scheduled, with a date. Urgent, not important: delegate or reduce. Neither: delete, and say so out loud.

  5. 05

    Check the second quadrant

    If important-not-urgent is empty, everything is being driven by deadlines and nothing is being driven by intent. That is the finding.

Characteristic failure mode

Everything lands in the first quadrant. The matrix then reproduces the flat list it was meant to sort, which means the definition of important was never written.

Worked example

A person has nineteen open commitments and no sense of order.

  1. 01Important defined as: affects the next twelve months.
  2. 02Fourteen are urgent, but only five clear that definition.
  3. 03Six urgent-but-unimportant items go back to whoever asked.

Result

The quadrant that was empty was important-not-urgent. That emptiness, rather than the sorting, was what the exercise found.

Where to go next