The Right Way to Prioritize with the Eisenhower Matrix
Taking time to think clearly isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity that leads to better decisions, clearer goals, and a more focused life.
In Undoing Urgency, I recommend the Eisenhower Matrix to classify your daily tasks. I first read about this matrix from my friend Brett McKay on his immensely popular Art of Manliness blog. The matrix provides a simple taxonomy: everything that takes up your time is either (1) Not Urgent / Not Important, (2) Urgent / Not Important, (3) Urgent / Important, or (4) Not Urgent / (Most) Important.
The matrix comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous statement, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent things are not important, and the important are never urgent.” While many important tasks may also be urgent tasks, what most people find who use the Eisenhower Matrix is that their Most Important tasks—the ones that help define their goals and affect their core values—are rarely urgent.
Classifying your tasks will also help reveal time-wasters and urgent work that takes up much more of your time than it should. Not all tasks are equally worthy of your attention. Perhaps the most important part of the exercise is identifying where you can pull weeds on activities that choke the time out of your day, where you may be able to delegate work, and where you need to put most of your focused work. In brief, here is how I recommend dealing with tasks that occupy each of the Eisenhower Matrix quadrants.
Quadrant 1: Not Urgent / Not Important
Action: Eliminate
If you are brutally honest in identifying tasks (or in your time audit), you will have more items in Quadrant 1 than you’d like. The aim is to purge these tasks from your life as much as possible. You may identify some things that feel like they should be in this category but are actually important to you (e.g., watching a movie with your family or spouse). Reclassify these tasks as needed and eliminate the rest.
Quadrant 2: Urgent / Not Important
Action: Delegate
We can’t simply eliminate urgent tasks from our days, but very often, we can reduce urgency by delegating. Some people deal with Quadrant 2 by simplifying their lifestyles, actively reducing the number of Urgent/Not Important tasks that nag at them. I am all for simplicity, but it’s not a workable solution for everyone, and minimalism as a catch-all response to urgency is restrictive. If you can’t simplify, then practice delegating. I’ve built this concept from the excellent book by Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time. At the core of buying back your time is the mental shift to understand that your time has value and that spending money to improve the use of your time is never a waste.
Quadrant 3: Urgent and Important
Action: Efficiency
Once you’ve eliminated Quadrant 1 tasks and delegated as many of those in Quadrant 2 as you can, the bulk of your daily work should revolve around Quadrant 3. These are the urgent and important tasks that only you can do. If you hope to have time to work on Quadrant 4, you must practice laser-focused efficiency to complete these tasks without letting them spread and take over our whole day. There are many tips and tricks for creating focused work. I detail my system in Undoing Urgency, but the mindset you should have with these tasks is to attack them and complete them each day as efficiently as possible.
Quadrant 4: Not Urgent / (Most) Important
Action: Enjoy
Our most important goals are sometimes so far off that we willingly put them aside day after day. I believe one of the best things a person can do to find joy in all parts of their lives is intentionally spending time on these things. The more time you spend in Quadrant 4, the more you will enjoy the pursuits of life.
The Skill of Prioritization
One of the most valuable skills you can develop is categorizing and prioritizing your tasks. Refine this skill, and it will pay off in both your work and your life.
