The Eisenhower Matrix
Posted by Salem on October 6, 2011
The Eisenhower Matrix
“The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones”.
The Eisenhower matrix helps you organise your tasks by breaking them down into one of four possible priorities.
Ask yourself:
- When will I deal with the things that are important but not urgent?
- When will I take the time to deal with important tasks before they become urgent?
- What tasks are urgent but not important that I can delegate?
- What tasks are neither and where’s the closest trash can?!
Or you can put this matrix on your white board, write tasks on Post-It notes and stick them where they belong.
It’s brilliant.
“Better late than never. But never late is better”.
This is from The Decision Book
Category: Business
Tags: eisenhower, management, models, time management, tools
I don’t like this model for one simple reason: “do it later” is not specific enough, it should be changed to “schedule an appropriate time to do it” because you can be stuck at putting tasks into “later” for too long (or forgotten) and then all of a sudden when it jumps to the “do it now” area, it’s too late.
A simple example would be writing an important report by tomorrow. You start your day and you ask yourself is it urgent? “No, not yet, having breakfast is more urgent”, later refueling your car becomes more urgent, answering a phone call is more urgent, and eventually before night time you realize that writing has become urgent, but then you realize you don’t have enough time to complete the task and pretty soon, “sleep” becomes urgent!
@3baid agree, the “do it later” has to have a time when it becomes “urgent, do it now!”, so the tasks are never static. This helps you achieve short term wins, and focus on long term important ones, but getting rid of the excess fat and the trivial many.
Another method is Warren Buffet’s: make a task list, and never move to the next task until you finish one. List them in order of priority. I used this before, but the list got too long and there weren’t enough hours in the day. Me thinks I’ll try the Eisenhower way ~
Whatever works to make your time better spent is what we should focus on! This is just a tool ~ how you use it is another matter n_n’
Hello,
thanks for this nice summary about the Eisenhower-Matrix.
If you are interested in a convenient and free software solution for using the Eisenhower-Matrix, the following link might be interesting for you:
https://www.tasksonsteroids.com/lq_task/quadrants
TasksOnSteroid’s LifeQuadrants is specifically designed to optimally support the user in the application of the Management-Matrix.
Greetings!
Chris