Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the most powerful tools a manager can add to their arsenal. The Eisenhower Matrix helps managers deal with the never-ending challenge of organizing tasks in the most efficient and effective way possible. If there’s something any manager knows, it’s that there is never a shortage of tasks to complete. However, it can be very hard to know how to prioritize those tasks in the most effective way. When challenges and opportunities exist simultaneously in multiple different parts of your business, how do you know where to start?

That’s where the Eisenhower Matrix comes in.

In this article, we’ll define what the Eisenhower Matrix is. We’ll also explore some of the benefits of the Eisenhower Matrix, then we’ll offer several examples and a template.

What Is the Eisenhower Matrix?

The Eisenhower Matrix sometimes goes by other names, such as the Eisenhower Priority Matrix, or the Urgency-Importance Matrix. But whatever you call it, the first question is the same: what is the Eisenhower Matrix?

The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple but powerful organizational and productivity tool, which helps you prioritize a list of multiple tasks according to their urgency and importance. The Eisenhower Matrix was named for Dwight D. Eisenhower, former President of the United States. President Eisenhower was renowned for his productivity, and the Eisenhower Matrix makes use of some of his approaches to management.

The way the Eisenhower Matrix functions is by categorizing tasks into one of four quadrants based on the criteria of urgency and importance.

1st Quadrant: Urgent and Important (Do). The tasks that go here need to be addressed immediately, and they also influence long-term objectives and projects. Major crises and deadlines typically always fall in this quadrant.

2nd Quadrant: Not Urgent But Important (Plan). These tasks are relevant to your long-term goals, but they don’t need to be addressed immediately. These tasks are still ripe for strategic planning and development.

3rd Quadrant: Urgent But Not Important (Delegate). These tasks need to be dealt with immediately, but they’re not especially significant for long-term goals. Therefore they can usually be delegated to other employees.

4th Quadrant: Not Urgent and Not Important (Eliminate). Tasks that are neither urgent nor important can waste a manager’s time. It’s best practice to shrink or eliminate these tasks as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Benefits of Eisenhower Matrix

There are several benefits of the Eisenhower Matrix:

Improved Focus

When you are overwhelmed with tasks and don’t know where to begin, it can be impossible to focus on a single objective. By organizing your workload in a logical manner, the Eisenhower Matrix can help you focus on the task at hand.

Enhanced Productivity

We can only really work on one thing at a time, and there are only so many hours in the day. By elevating high priority and high importance tasks, you can improve your overall productivity.

Reduced Stress

By eliminating unnecessary tasks and marshaling your resources toward the most important ones, you will help relieve yourself of some of the stresses of management.

Improved Time Management

Pushing non-critical tasks back and escalating critical ones, you will make more effective use of your time.

Superior Decision-Making

The Eisenhower Matrix offers a clear and effective framework for making decisions about how to distribute effort and resources.

Eisenhower Matrix Examples

To help you better understand how the Eisenhower Matrix can help you in your management tasks, we’re going to offer some Eisenhower Matrix examples for each of the four quadrants.

Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important (Do)

• • Helping a client navigate a crisis. For consultants, keeping your clients happy is a crucial part of the job. Your whole relationship is dependent on you helping the client meet their objectives. When the client experiences a crisis, it is both highly urgent and highly important, and you should attend to it immediately.
  • Proposal deadlines. When you’ve promised a client you’re going to deliver a proposal by a certain time, you’re effectively engaging in a tryout regarding your ability to achieve objectives in a predictable and timely manner. If you fail to meet your proposal deadline, it can damage your entire relationship.

Quadrant 2: Not Urgent But Important (Plan)

• • Professional Development. If you’re a consultant, it’s important to continue developing your education and skills. This may include attending workshops, enrolling in new courses or degree programs, or pursuing new certificates. These may not be urgent but you can’t avoid them entirely—you should plan to do them in the future.
  • Networking. It’s also highly important to build contacts among your peers in the industry. However, building these relationships isn’t as urgent as your actual work. You can make plans for developing these relationships over a longer time horizon.

Quadrant 3: Urgent But Not Important (Delegate)

• • Client updates. Clients generally prefer to be kept in the loop regarding progress, benchmarks, and challenges. These basic updates usually aren’t of paramount importance (unless something major has gone wrong). But they still need to be completed in a timely manner. This is often an appropriate task to assign to junior staff.
  • Scheduling meetings. This is another task that requires timeliness, but it doesn’t necessarily require special expertise. Junior employees and administrative assistants can often handle this task, taking it off the manager’s or consultant’s plate.

Quadrant 4: Not Urgent and Not Important (Eliminate)

• • Unnecessary meetings. If you’ve worked in a business or professional setting before, then you’re probably highly aware that not every meeting is useful. Many can be handled over email, or even eliminated entirely, with no real loss.
  • Manual data entry. Data entry can often be automated, freeing up time to attend to more urgent and important issues.

Eisenhower Matrix Template

We’re not just going to tell you about the Eisenhower Matrix. We’re also including an Eisenhower Matrix template, which you can start using today to organize your tasks and start making better use of your own time and resources. Follow the template below to create your own free Excel Eisenhower Matrix template to start unlocking the power of this simple tool.

Looking at the template, you can see that the x-axis separates tasks according to whether they are Urgent or Not Urgent. The y-axis is for placing them according to whether they are Important or Not Important. For each task on your list, decide whether it’s Important or not, and Urgent or not, then place it in the template and respond according to the approach for that quadrant.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a manager, a consultant, or some other kind of business professional, the odds are your to-do list is never anything but full. And you’ve probably experienced decision fatigue just trying to figure out which task to work on at any given time—if you can even get yourself to just focus on one task at a time.

This is exactly what the Eisenhower Matrix is designed to fix. By separating tasks into four categories according to their urgency and importance, you can gain much more clarity into where you should be investing your resources.

 

Additional Resources:

• Leadership: Where Everything Rises and Falls
• Consulting Resume: Complete Guide
• The Pyramid Principle; Applied