Eisenhower Matrix: How to Prioritise and Master Productivity

Do you have a map at work that takes you from source (current state) to destination (goals) without the stress of getting lost along the way, reaching a wrong spot or arriving too late?

Wouldn’t it be super useful to have something that creates a win-win situation at work. You get to do things that help you move the needle and also provide others with responsibilities that help them grow.

I am not talking about a tool to manage time but rather a discipline, decision framework to manage ourselves against our own priorities and expectations. Eisenhower Matrix (also called urgent-important matrix) as a method for productivity has been studied and put to use for many decades.

The decision principles in Eisenhower Matrix if employed right can help us create and traverse our own map at work. A map that avoids crisis situations by planning for the future, makes tasks more manageable, helps delegate more and avoid wasting time in doing inconsequential tasks.  

Expectations and priorities change at a very fast pace in our working environments and we all need a framework that’s simple, intuitive, flexible and aligns naturally with how work should be done without the overhead of managing it. 

From The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

Is this still worth doing?” And if it isn’t, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization 

To make effective use of this matrix, we first need to learn to distinguish between Urgent and Important. 

Eisenhower Matrix – Urgent vs Important: Work in present or plan for the future?

Urgent is reactive

Urgent work demands our attention right away and must complete within a specific time limit (typically small duration). Attending to production downtime, issue impacting a large customer base are all urgent tasks that require putting everything aside to address them.   

Important tasks become urgent in due course of time if delayed too much, not given proper attention or carried out without real interest. Taking time to write performance reviews, avoiding the difficult conversation, preparing for the presentation are all important tasks that can become urgent if we pretend to be too busy dealing with the urgent or procrastinate or delay purposefully in the hope of getting to it someday. 

Important is proactive

Important tasks align with the company’s mission and goals and have a large impact on its success. Important tasks requires initiative and proactiveness. Strategic thinking, risk analysis, roadmap creation, brainstorming, talking to your people, making sound decisions all require dedicated time to do quality work. 

Urgency makes us take decisions or do work that reverberates into the future. We have to spend more time trying to fix problems that were caused due to suboptimal decision making or rushing urgent tasks to mediocre completion. This tendency to attend to urgent tasks at the cost of important tasks leaves no time for important tasks. 

As Peter Drucker said, 

Effective people are not problem minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. 

4 Quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix for work prioritisation 

An act of prioritisation requires comparing tasks to their value and alignment with goals. Establishing goals before achieving prioritisation is paramount to use Eisenhower Matrix effectively. 

Eisenhower Matrix provides us with a framework that helps us “Organise and execute around priorities” — Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 

Lets understand the 4 quadrants of Eisenhower Matrix:

Quadrant 1 – Important, Urgent: Crisis Management

Tasks in this quadrant are Important and Urgent that deals with the crisis. Work produced here is low quality as decisions and solutions are made in haste (due to time limitations).

While getting these tasks done provides instant gratification, this quadrant gets bigger and bigger until it consumes us leaving us drained and burnout without significant contribution to our goals.  

People who spend a lot of their time in this quadrant jump from one situation to the next fooling themselves into believing that it will go away once they attend to it.  

Quadrant 2 – Important, Not Urgent: Plan for the future

While it’s not possible to completely avoid crisis, carefully planning work that aligns with long term goals while taking risk and other factors into account will involve less crisis creating a self-perpetuating cycle that will free up more time to do forward looking work.

Our natural tendency is to deal with the urgent while delaying important work. Spending more time in this quadrant will require exercising control as it will be the biggest driver in achieving significant results and creating value for the organisation and its people.  

Quadrant 3 – Not Important, Urgent: Delegate to create Win-Win situations

People with short term focus who act out of priorities defined by others can feel out of control as they need to execute on others expectations. Such people make mistakes as they treat not important work also as important and execute as though in quadrant 1. 

To separate important from not important requires careful examination, understanding and setting your own priorities.  

Tasks in this quadrant are perfect candidates to entrust your team with more responsibilities and empower them to make independent decisions. Delegating work in this manner will not only free up your time to do work that requires careful planning (quadrant 2), but also establish trust with your team members creating a win-win situation at work.  

Quadrant 4: Not Important, Not Urgent: Declutter your work

Separate work that’s useful and will truly add value from the one that tricks you into feeling important by keeping you busy (not important, not urgent). Once you have clearly separated it out, apply konmari method and declutter your work. 

Learn to say no to tasks (first to yourself and then to others) that are not urgent and not aligned with the goals of your team and company. These not important, not urgent tasks are time wasting efforts that can abdicate you from providing true value to your organisation and your people.    

Get your FREE copy of the Eisenhower Matrix Template that you can put to use right away at the end of this article

How to master productivity by putting Eisenhower Matrix to practical use

To be better informed and continue to be more productive requires devising a strategy to stay out of quadrant 3 and 4, reduce the number of tasks in quadrant 1 and slowly make way to do more work in quadrant 2. 

Taking on tasks that do not bring value in the name of flexibility at work is counterproductive and can have inadvertent consequences. Here I give you a few tips to put Eisenhower Matrix to practical use:

Know your mission and goals first

Knowing what you are trying to accomplish matters as it provides a reference point against which all future requests can be compared and validated. Learn your mission and establish your goals before creating tasks and dividing work (prioritisation) to achieve it. 

It’s not about ticking items off todo list, but rather learning to unlock your full potential and putting it to best use. 

Don’t procrastinate, plan 

Once you have established goals and a list of tasks to accomplish those goals, don’t procrastinate. Put Pareto Principle to use and organise these tasks in the 4 quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix. In the beginning, there might be more items in quadrant 1 (important and urgent), but through deliberate planning and execution you can move more work to quadrant 2. 

I personally prefer putting both personal and professional items in the same list since seldom these two lives are separate and it’s easier to find excuses to not do one of them if we don’t plan them together.

I also plan for a week in advance (Sunday night or first thing Monday morning) and revise the plan at the end of each day accounting for the learning during the day. 

Delegation as a means to empower and do more, much better 

Clear goals allow people to work interdependently while also making it easy to review the work and establish if things are going awry.

By delegating more responsibilities, you can empower your team to take decisions on their own while making your way to attend to other priority tasks. It is a great way to coach and provide feedback on how the people in your team are doing. Set clear goals and listen actively to ensure people in the team understand their expectations.  

While most activities in quadrant 3 can be delegated, there could also be tasks in quadrant 2 that can be stretch goals for some of your team members. 

Review your productivity gains

Setup time (just a few minutes) to review and learn how Eisenhower Matrix is helping you, what did you gain, what can you do better. Self directed learning of this form at work can provide tremendous benefit as it provides a mechanism to put this matrix to use in your own way.

Also, taking feedback from your manager, peers and direct reports can help in establishing a view of how others perceive these changes – Did they notice any changes in how work is done in the team, do they find it positive, do they feel work done is aligned with goals, how confident do they feel about achieving outcomes.

This form of direct questioning can be very powerful as it bridges the gap between how you view these changes to the impact it has on others. Learning this directly from your people can help you manage your blind spot and bring true productivity gains to your team.

Be flexible in your thinking and action

Any framework that you adopt should enable you to move fast (and not slow you down) while making the most optimal decisions. 

Don’t be too rigid or high strung when things don’t go as desired. As things change at work, learn to change your priorities using this framework while ensuring they are still aligned with the goals of your team and company. Flexibility in your thinking and action will be critical to make the best use of Eisenhower Matrix. 

Recommended Reading

Free Eisenhower Matrix Template

I have created an Eisenhower Matrix Template for your use in Trello. If you love using trello like I do, you can find a link to the template here. Simply create a board from the free template and start using. 

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