The Eisenhower Matrix: how to prioritise urgent and important work

The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple way to prioritise: you sort every task by two questions, is it urgent and is it important, and put it in one of four boxes. Urgent and important tasks you do now. Important but not urgent tasks you schedule. Urgent but unimportant tasks you delegate. Everything else you drop.

Its real value is the second box. Most busy people handle urgent work well and neglect important work that has no deadline. The matrix makes that trade-off visible.

What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

The matrix is a two-by-two grid. One axis is urgency, the other is importance.

• Do: important tasks with a real deadline or consequence today.
• Schedule: important tasks without a deadline. Put a date and time on them and do them yourself.
• Delegate: tasks that need doing soon but do not need you.
• Delete: tasks that are neither. Stop doing them.

Where does the name come from?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States, from 1953 to 1961, and before that a World War II general who commanded Allied forces. In an address in Evanston, Illinois, on 19 August 1954, he said: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

He did not claim the idea as his own. In the speech he credited an unnamed former college president. The four-box method was built on that idea later and took Eisenhower's name.

What is the difference between urgent and important?

Urgent tasks demand attention now. Someone is waiting, a deadline is close, or something is broken. They feel pressing, and they are usually visible to others.

Important tasks move you toward your goals. Their payoff is often larger but further away, so they rarely shout for attention.

The two are independent. A ringing phone is urgent but may not be important. Building next quarter's pipeline is important but rarely urgent until it is too late.

Why do we pick urgent tasks over important ones?

Researchers have a name for this. In a 2018 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee describe the mere urgency effect: across five experiments, people chose tasks with lower payoffs over tasks with higher payoffs when the lower-payoff tasks only looked urgent, for example because they seemed about to expire. In the authors' words, people behave as if an urgent task "has its own appeal".

The same research found that reminding people of the payoffs at the moment they chose reduced the effect. That is exactly what the Eisenhower Matrix does: it forces you to ask what each task is worth before you start it.

Eisenhower Matrix examples for sales and marketing

Quadrant 1: urgent and important (do it now)

• A key customer reports a problem that blocks their renewal.
• A proposal for a large deal is due to the buyer today.
• A paid campaign is spending budget on a broken landing page.
• A contract needs your signature before the end of the quarter.

Quadrant 2: important, not urgent (schedule it)

• Prospecting for next quarter's pipeline. See our prospecting strategies.
• Improving your sales cadence or email sequences.
• Writing cornerstone content and updating key landing pages.
• Customer interviews, win-loss reviews and sales training.
• Sales forecasting and planning.

This is where most long-term growth comes from. If nothing here is in your calendar, it will not happen.

Quadrant 3: urgent, not important (delegate it)

• Formatting a report someone else could build from a template.
• Scheduling meetings that a scheduling tool or assistant could handle.
• Many internal requests that need an answer today but not from you.
• Routine data entry that could be automated. See our guide to marketing automation.

Quadrant 4: not urgent, not important (delete it)

• Recurring meetings with no clear purpose or decision.
• Reports nobody reads.
• Constantly checking dashboards or inboxes between tasks.
• Polishing work beyond the point where it changes the result.

How to use the Eisenhower Matrix

1. List everything. Write down every task and open request for the week.
2. Ask about importance first. Does this task move a goal you are measured on? If not, it belongs in box 3 or 4.
3. Then ask about urgency. Is there a real deadline or consequence in the next day or two?
4. Act on each box. Do box 1, put box 2 tasks in your calendar, hand box 3 to someone or a tool, and drop box 4.
5. Protect box 2 time. Block time for important work, ideally early in the day, before urgent requests arrive.
6. Review weekly. Tasks move between boxes as deadlines approach. A neglected box 2 task often becomes a box 1 crisis.

A full box 1 week after week is a warning sign. It usually means important work was not scheduled early enough, or that too much is landing on one person.

Tools that help

You can draw the matrix on paper or a whiteboard. In a task manager such as Todoist or Trello, create four labels, lists or columns, one per quadrant, and sort your tasks into them. For more options, see our list of productivity apps and our productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.

What are the limits of the Eisenhower Matrix?

• It does not rank tasks within a box. When box 1 has five items, you still need another rule, such as impact or effort.
• Importance is a judgement. It works best when you have clear goals to measure tasks against.
• Delegation needs someone to delegate to. Solo founders and small teams may need to automate or drop box 3 tasks instead.

Used weekly, it is a fast check that your time goes to the work that matters, not just the work that is loudest.