The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the simplest tools that can quickly make you a lot better at managing your time. As TimeGT has always had support for organizing your tasks according to this system, let’s take a closer look and see why it’s important to understand this method.Although this method was made popular by Stephen Covey in his book “First Things First”, the concept is originally credited to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, pictured right.
Whenever confronted with something that needed to be done, he would ask himself two questions. First, is the task important? Second, is it urgent?
Based on this, the task would end up in one of four categories:
- Urgent and Important – for example the kitchen catching fire, a deadline to submit tax reports, a baby crying
- Not Urgent and Important – doing exercises, long term planning, working on a project
- Urgent and Not Important – various interruptions, facebook updates (not that Eisenhower used Facebook at his time), dealing with annoying people
- Not Urgent and Not Important – activities that just waste time, procrastination, checking the latest lolcats, the wikipedia time-sucking hole, etc
The Four Quadrants
These categories are commonly visualised as the quadrants shown on the right.The order in which you fulfill the tasks is important. As you only have a limited amount of time every day and can’t possibly do everything, it is important to prioritize the tasks you must do.
Obviously the first priority goes to the tasks that are Important and Urgent. That’s clear. However what is not so obvious is that tasks labelled Important and Not Urgent get the next priority.
Eisenhower himself is quoted as saying:
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”He couldn’t have been more right.
Without the matrix in sight, people often forget this and tend to rush to deal with all the Urgent and Not Important tasks at hand, pushing the important, but not urgent ones somewhere into the far future.
This is when you know you should be working on a project, but instead end up checking Facebook, reading that really really urgent e-mail from a friend with a hilarious youtube video or chatting about plans for the weekend on Skype.
Thus, your second priority should be to spend time on important tasks that are not urgent and only then on urgent tasks that are not important.
The tasks in the 4th quadrant, Not Urgent and Not Important should be dropped. If there is no rush for doing them and they don’t matter anyway, why even bother?
How this helps?
When consciously filtering all incoming distractions based on their importance, you end up doing less of the not important ones and thus become more productive in your work.The Important and Not Urgent quadrant is where you want to spend most of you time. It’s a peaceful place to work on things that are important and to have enough time to finish them.
Achieving this is not so hard. First, only do tasks that are important. Second, plan ahead. If you look ahead and take control of the way you spend your time, you can finish all your tasks before they become urgent.
This way you will become more focused and more productive in all the things you do!
Final words
TimeGT supports the Eisenhower method by giving you the possibility to mark all your tasks as either important and/or urgent, thus automatically sorting the list for you so you always know what to do next.What’s your experience with the Eisenhower Matrix? Do you user it? Has it helped you in your life? Post comments below!
