Essential Tools

The Eisenhower Method helps you decide which action you should or shouldn't do. It aids you to divide actions into one of four categories. The quadrants are divided by importance and urgency.

"What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important". – Dwight D. Eisenhower

How to Use the Eisenhower Method

Using the Eisenhower quadrant is very easy. You pick an item from your to-do list and ask yourself these two questions.

• "Is it urgent?"
• "Is it important?"

You can now put the action into the correct quadrant.

Below is an explanation of each quadrant.

4. Not Urgent and Not Important Examples:

• Time wasters (Ex: Facebook, checking e-mails all the time…)
• Busy work (Ex: Work that doesn't need to be done)
• Procrastinating

You should not spend any time on activities in this quadrant. When is something not important? If it doesn't progress you toward your goals, then why should you spend time doing it?

When is something not urgent? If it doesn't matter when it is done, then it's not urgent. It can be done today, or it can be done next week or even next year, it doesn't matter.

The combination of not urgent and not important is the worst quadrant to spend your time in. Decrease your time in this quadrant and put it somewhere else. I prefer you put it in 'not urgent and important'.

3. Urgent and Not Important

Examples:

• Answering e-mails
• Incoming phone calls
• Interrupting colleagues

Since the tasks are still not important and you're still not progressing towards your goals' it's better to not spend time here either. However, these tasks are urgent, therefore you can't schedule them. They're also hard to ignore, since urgent action often demands attention. Ex: A phone call or an interrupting colleague. Find a way to deal with these as quickly as possible.

2. Urgent and Important

Examples:

• Emergencies
• Troubleshooting
• Deadlines

You have to do these actions. They're important. They progress you toward your goals, however, since they're urgent, they're often unplanned and unwanted.

You will always spend some time here, since emergencies will always happen. When they do, you have to deal with them. No excuses. After you deal with the situation, spend time to make sure it never happens again, minimize its occurrence or make preparations for when it happens again.

1. Not Urgent and Important

Examples:

• Building quality relationships with other people
• Doing actual work to progress toward a major goal
• Physical exercise

This is the quadrant in which you should spent most of your time. Most people however, don't do this and spend most of their time in any of the other quadrants. Because these important tasks don't scream to you like a ringing phone, they're often neglected in favor of more urgent matters.

If you spend almost no time here, then your first important task is to save some time each day to work on the important things.

Urgent activities are often the ones we concentrate on and often forget about really important ones. If you spend all of your time concentrating on the urgent and important tasks you will just be firefighting. Managing time effectively, and achieving the things that you want to achieve, means spending your time on things that are important and not just urgent.

We can categorize tasks on two scales according to their importance and urgency. Making 4 categories and placing them in matrix known also as Time Matrix below.