Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix sorts your actions by importance and urgency. Four boxes, filled in automatically from the ratings you give on each action. Do First is important and urgent. Schedule is important and not yet urgent, but this is where most of the meaningful work should live. Delegate is urgent but not important. That's many of the things that arrive in your inbox. And Eliminate is neither urgent nor important, so get rid of them. The name comes from a remark Eisenhower quoted in a speech in 1954, about the urgent and the important seldom being the same thing. He did not build the grid. Stephen Covey did, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, and it is Covey's version everyone now uses. Covey's argument was that almost all of us spend too much time in 'do it first' and too little time in Schedule, and then we wonder why a year has passed without the important things moving. Urgent work is always there, in your face. Important work waits patiently, and it just doesn't get done unless you decide you're putting it at the forefront of what you want to get done. Here, a falling score is a good one. It is the share that's sitting in Do First. So watch it come down over the few months will mean that you're catching things before they catch fire. The honest test for Delegate is whether it has to be you. Often, it's quicker to do it yourself this once, and this has been the case for many years. But actually getting somebody else to do it, delegating it to them, could mean that you don't have to do it again, and then you can focus on the important tasks. You should check your Eisenhower Matrix weekly.