The Eisenhower Matrix
Coined to former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the “Eisenhower Method” helps to decide what action to take upon a set of tasks depending on their urgency and importance.
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower —
First, we need to define the importance and urgency to correctly understand how to apply the method. After that make a list of items you want to prioritize and organize them by importance and urgency and place them in the chart below.
Importance is measured by how the tasks or issues contribute to our goals and objectives. Urgency is defined by the need for immediate action or not.
Looking at the image above we can see that we have four sections or quadrants. Divide the tasks you have on hand by these sections and then, follow the recommended actions.
Act on it now
Importance: High
Urgency: High
Tasks that are in this quadrant are the most important tasks and should be tackled ASAP. These are critical issues that cannot wait like deadlines, crisis or problems.
Decide on action
Importance: High
Urgency: Low
Even though these items are extremely important they can wait for a better time to be achieved. These are items like future plans, self-improvement, etc.
Delegate
Importance: Low
Urgency: High
These tasks are urgent but not really important. Considering that you have all quadrants filled you should delegate them ensuring that they are being done without you having to invest time on them.
Delay
Importance: Low
Urgency: Low
Given that these tasks are not important nor urgent you should either delete them from your to-do list or delay them until their importance/priority change or they are the only items in your list.
This is a very simple method to divide and organize multiple tasks you have on your to-do list and that will be eventually sorted by priority helping you sort out your life.
This is article #1 from the series Strategic Thinking, a series of short articles focused on actionable methods to help you reach consolidated decisions with strong reasoning behind it. Any questions or suggestions do drop me a message below or give me a shout on Twitter.
