Eisenhower Matrix
Sort a task list by importance and urgency, and see which quadrant each task lands in. Add your own tasks or load a set of examples to see how the four quadrants behave in practice.
Do first
Important and urgent
Do it today, and keep the list short. If this quadrant fills up, the schedule quadrant was ignored for too long.
Nothing here yet. A client deadline that lands tomorrow, a payment that failed, a launch that is already announced.
Schedule
Important, not urgent
Put a date on it. This is where planning, writing, hiring and maintenance live, and it is the quadrant that gets postponed first.
Nothing here yet. Drafting next quarter’s content plan, fixing a slow checkout, documenting a recurring process.
Delegate
Urgent, not important
Hand it to someone else, automate it, or answer it in a fixed window. Much of what feels urgent here is someone else’s deadline.
Nothing here yet. A colleague’s formatting request, a meeting that could be an email, a report nobody reads.
Delete
Neither important nor urgent
Drop it and write down why. Tasks rarely disappear on their own; they usually sit in a list and generate guilt.
Nothing here yet. A conference talk you said yes to out of politeness, a tool trial you never started, a dashboard nobody opens.
How to read the quadrants
- · Important and urgent: do it now, then ask why it became urgent.
- · Important, not urgent: give it a date before it moves left.
- · Urgent, not important: delegate, automate, or batch it into one window.
- · Neither: remove it from the list and note the reason.
The matrix sorts tasks, not people. A task that is urgent because a colleague is waiting still belongs in delegate, even when it feels rude to say so.
Where the method usually fails
Urgency is often inherited from someone else’s planning, so the top-left quadrant fills with tasks that were important to another person last week. The useful question is not “is this urgent?” but “what happens if this waits until Thursday?”
The examples in this tool are fictional composites, chosen to show typical entries rather than a real task list.
For the focus side of the same problem, the guide on the 90-minute block covers how to protect the time that the schedule quadrant needs.