The Eisenhower Matrix: The Key to Productivity and Time Management.
Do you ever feel like 24 hours just aren’t enough, sleep is for the weak, and you’re always in the reactive mode? If you’re anything like me, you procrastinate tasks long enough and then scramble to finish them just in time. Is that productive or efficient? No. But is that the reality? Yes.
Research suggests that people are working harder for less these days.
However, how quickly you find solutions to work problems is the new measure of productivity rather than the number of hours you put into it.
Luckily for us, we can still save our businesses and ourselves from a life of stress & chaos with a little help from the fifth-best President of the U.S, Dwight Eisenhower.
He left us the single greatest decision-making tool to combat unproductivity — the ‘Urgent -Important’ Matrix, or the Eisenhower matrix, named after him.
Developed in the 1950s, this was popularized by author and motivational speaker Steven Covey in his bestsellers’ Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ and ‘First Things First’
How could Ike a.k.a Dwight Eisenhower plan and accomplish it all?
Yes. You are busy, as am I. But, are we as busy as the man who successfully ran a superpower? Speaking for myself, I am not.
Being the President of the United States of America is not an easy gig. It entails numerous matters of varying intensity that need attention and keep cropping up every now and then.
So how did Ike display such control and remain productive throughout his storied career?
What is the Eisenhower Principle?
Ike famously quoted
“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
The Urgent-Important method starts easy, what you do is, simply divide your to-dos into urgent and important, and then apply the four rules of action: Do, Plan, Delegate, and Eliminate.
This “Eisenhower Principle” is how Ike organized his workload and priorities.
The productivity strategy derived from this method is very visual, straightforward, and found to be highly effective since about 65% of us are visual learners.
What is ‘important’ and what is ‘urgent’?
Before I start defining the matrix, let me get you acquainted with the distinction between the two categories on which the whole principle is based.
What are ‘important’ tasks?
These are tasks that you know you need to do, at the back of your mind, but you don’t plan on doing any time soon. You full well know that these are consequential in nature and lead to achieving significant results irrespective of how long they take to accomplish, whether personal or professional.
These usually require a planned effort and they are typically long term.
You must keep enough time to complete such activities to operate in the proactive mode instead of the reactive mode. When you are in the proactive mode, you are calm, rational, and more accepting of new challenges and opportunities a.k.a your sanest-best mode.
What are ‘urgent’ tasks?
These tasks scream out “Right Now!” and demand immediate attention. Urgent tasks put you in a reactive mode where you act only on impulse and nothing else. They are often the ones on which you end up spending most of your time.
Doing only the urgent things results in important things turning into urgent ones with little to no time to accomplish them. This leads to fight-or-flight scenarios, and you either end up succumbing to stress or not completing tasks in the intended and desired manner.
But, you’re not alone. And it looks like you aren’t really to much blame.
A recent study by the Journal of Consumer Research found out that our attention is drawn to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that are do not offer instant gratification and are less urgent, even when the less urgent tasks provide more significant long term benefits and rewards.
This “Mere-Urgency Effect” is the reason we turn into what Tim Urban calls ‘Instant Gratification Monkeys’ and do tasks with a deadline first.
Even though it is how we’re wired, we must make sure that we don’t let the ‘instant gratification monkey’ steer the ‘S.S Brain’ because he ONLY thinks about the present and as adults we appreciate how we need to spend adequate time on important long term goals and tasks too, instead of just the urgent ones.
If you don’t want to be a trembling ball of stress every time the deadline-train looms in the distance, you need to get this difference pat-down and keep some time to work on decluttering your desk & organizing your paperwork, looking up that Spanish class you always wanted to go to or working on the new project proposal you thought would really work for your company.
What is the Eisenhower method?
Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is elementary. Using the 2x2 decision matrix below, you can separate your activities based on four possibilities.
Urgent and important (tasks you will have to complete immediately).
Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
The Quadrant 1: Urgent, important (DO)
Tasks from Quadrant 1 are the real-life versions of warnings and alert messages popping all over your screen, again and again, forcing you to deal with them before you can access your screen.
These are of course essential, time-sensitive activities. Not dealing with them immediately will result in problematic, near-catastrophic situations.
Sure, these days, in our hyper-aware state, everything feels like a crisis, but these are different — waking nightmares if you will.
Like, let’s say, the lack of financial resources resulting in an immediate crashing halt on your project activities, dealing with an unfortunate, unintended PR faux pas, or a major operations misfire.
While these are the activities that demand most of your attention, you should get away from this quadrant into the more relaxed, planned, big-boy or big-girl ASAP.
Quadrant 2: Not urgent, important (PLAN)
These are the big-boy activities I was talking about. They are essential, but you don’t do those right away. You plan to accomplish them at a more suitable time depending on your schedule and…your willingness.
Now I know, everyone tends to naturally gravitate towards the top-left quadrant — the urgent and important, and then go to the third — not important, urgent quadrant, but Quadrant 2 should be your primary focus.
These could be your long-term goals. Take, for example, building productive relationships with your team members, juniors, clients, and potential partners, looking for and researching new skills to acquire, or identifying and documenting risks in your upcoming project.
Quadrant 3: Urgent, not important (DELEGATE)
The best way to take care of the tasks in Quadrant 3 is just to “take care” of them and not do them, by delegating them to someone else. These tasks are urgent but not important. Here, ‘not important’ does not mean these tasks are of menial or are of little value, but it means that they are not so important that you would have to do them yourself.
So don’t worry, it is not like you are disparaging a team member or not caring enough about a project. The sentiment here is — you are helping a team member grow by expanding the scope of their responsibility in the project and also trusting them to hit it out of the park. That’s the textbook definition of ‘win-win’.
Imagine this scenario: You are knee-deep into managing a particularly important function of a project.
Suddenly you get to know of server downtime turning your ‘release’ plans into dust, and you can save the day only by talking to I.T. This is urgent and important too. However, this typically does not involve expertise that only you possess.
So, implementing the Eisenhower method, you can delegate this task to someone else and trust them to be your project’s guardian angel
But if that’s not your MO, remember that we live in the Age of Information, and that technology is at a stage where it can be your best, most competent teammate and carry out almost all tasks for you.
Such tasks seem urgent and important when they come up, worrying you to insanity in the beginning, but trust other people to handle these and it’ll be just fine!
Need I remind you how Fiverr, Postmates, and Taskrabbit are mainstream now? Why limit it to personal tasks when there can be better results if you apply technology to work tasks?
Quadrant 4: Not Important, Not Urgent (ELIMINATE)
The tasks that can be categorized in this quadrant can be avoided entirely. It's like the Konmari method for work. Only, here you eliminate tasks that just ‘spark joy’ and do nothing productive for you.
Author Steven Covey says that some people tend to spend the most time on Quadrant 4, believing they’re working in Q1 because they’re busy with busy work that does not particularly advance your project’s or own goals.
These can also be simple, day to day tasks and distractions like incoming calls, emails, and social media. Such tasks can seriously throw you off the track, but also serve as downtime or an escape for many(the latter is true only for hopeless workaholics, of course)
Since these are concrete, tactile tasks, the completion gives you a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that comes from checking something off your list.
The Eisenhower method doesn’t call for eliminating these tasks, Eisenhower himself was known to enjoy bridge and golf quite regularly.
These intermissions were necessary for Ike to take on some of the more stressful aspects of a presidency.
But if you too limit these activities to serve the purpose of a quick ‘battery-recharge,’ it replenishes your mental and physical energy, perhaps, even allowing you to relegate them to Quadrant 2.
How to use technology for delegation and optimization?
We use technology for anything and everything. And while I don’t condone using technology all the time, every time, I strongly recommend making technology your best friend for implementing the Eisenhower method.
Technological tools used in the right manner, like, for example, project management, serve as the fuel that accelerates your project train.
Chip away at tasks from Q2, keep track of the tasks from Q3 that you delegate to others, and monitor the progress and status with the help of task management tools.
Steps and Tips to implement the Eisenhower technique
1. Making lists may seem a little over-the-top and unnecessary, but studies show that it significantly de-stresses you. List making can be inconvenient and you can’t always flip out a notebook and jot down stuff whenever you remember it.
List-making can be inconvenient, and you can’t always flip out a notebook and jot down stuff whenever you remember it. What you can do is look for a task tracking tool that will allow you to add tasks, mark their complexity, priority, and essential details, so that you can decide upon its fate later when you make the matrix. Xebrio is a tool that enables easy task-delegation and collaboration, excellent task tracking, and even allows to connect tasks in your project to your projects requirements, milestones, or test cases.
Every time I make a list and record my tasks using Xebrio, I feel like I’m halfway to my destination, or at least that I have a map and I know exactly where and how to go.
The Eisenhower technique is based on this very truism. However, the first step to implementing the Eisenhower technique is optimization — questioning whether you need to put a task on a to-do list at all.
Or, to stick to my metaphor, questioning whether you need the world map when you’re only going two towns over.
Once you are left with a list that cannot be optimized any further, categorize the tasks into quadrants.
2. Add some colors! Personalize it. Color code each quadrant. Assign colors that depict the priority of the tasks so that when you’re pressed for time, a cursory glance will also help you understand what you need to do.
Assigning the color red for Q1 and a happy or calm color like yellow or green for Q2 works wonders for me.
I know, color-coding sounds elementary, but given its advantages with grasping the situation quickly, it bears repeating. Trust me.
3. Maintain a limit for each quadrant. 7–8 tasks per quadrant is sufficient. If you need to add more jobs, do as author Mark Twain says, “eat the frog first” — complete the hardest most important task first, clear out your list in that order and then add more, to not overwhelm yourself.
4. Assign time limits to tasks. I like to use the Pomodoro technique (working in 25 minute long blocks of time, followed by a 5-minute break, and a 20-minute break after four 25 minute blocks). More importantly, say no to distractions, that’s where you’ll need your best effort.
5. Before you leave work, make a work plan for the next day, so that you subconsciously process it and are better prepared to take your to-do list head-on in the morning. Follow your plan religiously, complete your to-dos, and let this sense of accomplishment fuel your productivity.
6. This one applies to some of us who are diligent and on occasion (read: every day at work), a little high strung — do not micro-manage your to-dos; take a breather once in a while even if you cannot get your project running as you wish using the Eisenhower way
The key to mastering the Ike technique
If you want to be good at it, never lose sight of the formula: Productivity = effectiveness + efficiency. Or to simplify it — Doing the right things the right way.
Making the distinction between urgent and important is the key to mastering the Ike technique, actually. This way, the activities that truly matter in work and life are never out of sight or rushed to mediocre completion.
Otherwise, you have a natural tendency to procrastinate and focus on unimportant, urgent activities, only to get a false instant gratification of being productive.
Gradually, you move from “firefighting” into a position where you can grow in your professional as well as personal life.
Most of us recognize that activities leading to our overall well being are essential.
For example, former U.S President Barack Obama never missed his hour-long workout in the morning and dinner with his family every night because he believed that the rest of his time was significantly more productive this way.
The trick is to gradually reduce the number of tasks in Quadrant 1 by spending as much time as possible in Quadrant 2.
How can businesses apply the Eisenhower matrix?
A typical business and a typical project consist of different types of tasks being carried out by different departments and different people, each a priority for someone and unimportant for someone else.
How do you decide what to push forward and what to ax?
This dilemma is real. That’s why we see office administrators, human resource executives, and business analysts hastily putting out organizational fires.
Businesses should apply the Eisenhower matrix holistically as well as atomistically. This will help the project manager, for example, refocus on what should be handled when, and who should focus on what.
The Eisenhower matrix works wonders for prioritizing tasks in product development. Let’s break down requirement management and product planning to the most basic level using a very simple product for an example — making a table, from the minute the order for raw material has been placed.
This is what the Eisenhower matrix will look like:
So roughly speaking, brainstorming & innovation, all strategy planning, risk analysis, and road mapping are functions that belong to Quadrant 2. These are ongoing, critical processes that define your business, describe your company’s goals and objectives, but have leeway for change accommodation. You know you have to do these things, but it is not like you have to put extra efforts into it right now.
Activities that can be described as the load-bearing, balancing cards in the house of cards that is your project, that are tasks that can be roadblocks in your project’s operations if not completed right away, or are emergencies, belong to Quadrant 1.
On the other hand, requirements, events, and operations whose order bears particular importance are tasks from Quadrant 3. But who does these tasks is not significant.
Let's look at our example of making tables:
Ensuring that as soon as wooden boards arrive at the inventory, they are stored in specific conditions and patterns is urgent because, in case of extreme weather conditions, the wooden boards run the risk of either swelling up or shrinking.
If this happens, the rest of the plan will need adjustment. Thus the urgency.
However, since the conditions are so specific, it is not so crucial that you need to invest your time and effort into it, this task can be easily delegated.
The phrase ‘nice to have’ is thrown quite leniently in the I.T industry, and is the subject of a lot of inside jokes since it means different things to different project roles.
But most of the times complying to these requirements is not urgent nor important. These tasks can be eliminated since they do not make up a part of the MVP — Minimum Viable Product.
Gradually, the scope for your MVP will grow. However, there will always be tasks that will be reserved for the next iteration and deleted in this one.
Remember these ‘nice to haves’ because they, most of the times, represent a cosmetic or minor non-functional requirement.
And, in today’s competitive world, when you want your customers coming back for more, catering to these requirements may help you seal deals and get that buck.
How can individuals apply the Eisenhower quadrant to balance personal and work life?
In the face of rising workplace burnout — something experienced by almost 23% of employees of all levels globally, Eisenhower’s method offers a simple framework to help people balance the amount on their plate.
Sending those emails to the right person today itself is important, but so is your daughter’s football game. To avoid overlapping of work and personal tasks, make separate matrices.
This will ensure you get closer to being ‘Parent of the Year’ as well as ‘Manager of the Year’. while being happy and productive.
Why is the Eisenhower matrix exactly what we need in this day and age?
Instead of putting out incidental fires, the Eisenhower Matrix gives you a way to identify and deal with flammable situations before they can get out of hand.
You may have heard this one quote from author and software development guru Kevlin Henney — “There is no code faster than no code”, and dismissed it as an absolute load of…hogwash.
But, the Eisenhower matrix suddenly gives meaning to it, since you question whether certain tasks align with your core values and long term or current goals at all and whether it is necessary to do them. If not, these tasks are moved directly to the ‘Delete’ quadrant.
If you do have a seemingly unending list of to-dos, there are many tools that can help you deal with it, from the traditional, simplistic pen and paper to a modern, well-equipped task management software — something that will help you turn the decisions you make using the Eisenhower box into tasks and make you stick to it too.
This method has proven to be a life-changing hit for many from table-makers to rocket-makers, because it ultimately puts you into a habit of taking projects to successful completion, making you productive and successful in the long run.
