curated · working-in
Eisenhower Matrix
Urgent and important are not the same word. Force them apart.
Origin: Dwight D. Eisenhower (paraphrased), popularised by Stephen Covey
The model
Tasks classified across two axes — urgency on one and importance on the other — into four quadrants. Q1 (urgent and important) gets done; Q2 (important but not urgent) gets scheduled; Q3 (urgent but not important) gets delegated or batched; Q4 (neither) gets dropped. The attribution is to Eisenhower's 1954 Northwestern speech and the popularisation is owed to Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
When to reach for it
- Triaging a backlog when "everything feels urgent".
- End-of-week reviews when the week's output does not match the week's stated priorities.
- Deciding what to drop, not just what to add.
When not to
- For real-time prioritisation where the cost of writing it down exceeds the cost of just doing the next thing.
- When the actual problem is that "important" is undefined — fix that first.
In the wild
Sources
- Stephen Covey — The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)