Brief Introduction to Eisenhower Decision Matrix: Urgent and Important

Wrong prioritization may lead to completely sapping and draining of energy. It happens when you feel that you spend all your time managing crises. Productivity suffers.

Perhaps you confuse the urgent with the important.

This post describes the principles that guided the great general and president, Dwight D. Eisenhower through his entire hugely successful career. Here we also try to realize, how to make real progress in your life, distinguishing between urgent and important tasks.

What is the difference between Urgent and Important?

• Urgent component means that a task requires immediate attention. Urgent tasks put managers in a reactive mode. And it can be marked by a negative, defensive, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset.
• Important component means that tasks are things that contribute to value, long-term mission, and goals. Important tasks may be also urgent. Focusing on important tasks, we operate in a responsive mode, that helps us remain rational and open to new opportunities.

This distinction is rather intuitive. However, most of us frequently fall into the trap of believing that all urgent activities are also important.

Media and modern technologies constantly provide us with information as equally urgent and pressing. In this environment, it is easy to lose sight of the distinction between the truly important and the merely urgent.

In fact, the consequences of this priority-blindness may be both personal and social.

The power of the Eisenhower decision matrix

Stephen Covey was the first who popularized the Eisenhower’s Decision Principle in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The author created a decision matrix that is aimed to help individuals make the distinction between what’s important and not important / what’s urgent and what’s not.

The matrix includes a square with 4 quadrants:

1. Urgent/Important
2. Not Urgent/Important
3. Urgent/Not Important
4. Not Urgent/Not Important

So, let’s dive into details about each quadrant and understand which one we should spend most of our time in to get a better life :)

Quadrant 1. Urgent and Important

The tasks in Quadrant 1 are both urgent and important. They require immediate attention. Here you will typically see crises, problems, or deadlines. Here’re some examples: tax deadline, unexpected emails that require an immediate reply, documents deadline, a heart attack, car crash, household chores and so on and so forth.

With a bit of planning, many of these tasks can be made more efficient or even eliminated outright.

Although we’ll never be able to eliminate urgent and important tasks completely, we can significantly reduce them by spending more time in Quadrant 2.

Quadrant 2. Not Urgent but Important

The tasks in Quadrant 2 don’t have pressing deadlines, however, they help you achieve the important personal and business goals.

These tasks are typically centered around strengthening relationships, planning for the future, and improving your skills. What are these tasks? The probable examples are:

• Studying
• Monthly planning
• Long-term planning
• Reading professional books
• Family time
• Taking classes to improve your foreign language
• Spending time with your hobby
• Car maintenance and so on.

We should spend most of our time on Q2 tasks, as they provide us with happiness and success.

Alas — there are some challenges that keep us from investing enough time and energy into these tasks:

• If you do not know what values and goals are important to you, you obviously won’t know what things you should be spending your time on to reach those goals.
• We all tend to focus on whatever is most pressing at the moment. It’s difficult to get motivated to do something when there isn’t a deadline looming over our head. In this case, willpower and self-discipline must be actively cultivated.

The Q2 tasks are not pressing for our attention and we typically keep them forever on the backburner with the statement: “I’ll get to those activities ‘someday’. But “someday” will never come as you’ll always feel about as busy as you are now.

Quadrant 3. Urgent and Not Important

These activities require your attention right now (urgent), but don’t help to achieve your goals (not important).

Most of them are interruptions from other people: emails and messages, phone calls, request from your former team member to help with providing a recommendation letter, etc.

Many people spend most of their time on Q3 tasks.

These tasks are usually tangible; the completion of them gives you that sense of satisfaction that comes from checking something off your list.

They can be important to others and not important to you. What to do? Just try to be more assertive and start to firmly say no to most Q3 requests.

Quadrant 4. Not Urgent and Not Important

This quadrant combines activities that aren’t urgent and aren’t important. The tasks here aren’t pressing nor do they help you achieve your long-term goals. They are primarily distractions:

• Playing video games or watching TV
• Surfing the internet without goals
• Scrolling your social media
• Making selfies
• Gambling, etc.

It’s a bad idea to eliminate Q4 activities altogether from your life. You’ll definitely need to browse the internet or watching a favorite TV show after your busy day.

Just try to only spend a very limited amount of time on them and you’ll succeed.

More time on important tasks is the solution

As product management popularity is constantly growing and product managers are evolving their skillsets, the ability to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s truly important is going to be one of the most relevant skills.

Apply the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to as many aspects of your life as you can and you’ll see the results quickly. Such professional PM tools as Hygger.io may provide you with 2x2 matrix for prioritization where you can set the Urgent and Importance parameters and work with this tool.

Using the matrix will help you to think about the ways you can reduce the amount of time you spend on Q1, Q3, and Q4 tasks and increase the amount of time you spend on Q2 activities.

What do you think of the model of Urgent/Important?