Eisenhower Matrix

Where the name comes from

In August 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to the World Council of Churches at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Partway through, he quoted a former college president. He did not say who, and no one knows for certain. Eisenhower had himself been president of Columbia University until 1953.

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois, August 19, 1954, quoting an unnamed college president

The four boxes

The grid came later. Stephen Covey made the four quadrants popular in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), where he calls it the time management matrix. It crosses the two questions to give four kinds of task, each with its own answer:

• Urgent and important: do it now.
• Important, not urgent: schedule it.
• Urgent, not important: delegate it.
• Neither: drop it.

How the module works

One grid for the week, with urgency across and importance down, and each box's name set large and faint behind the space you write in: Do, Schedule, Delegate, Delete. Write each task where it belongs once, then work from Do.

The box to watch is Schedule. Important work that is never urgent is exactly what Eisenhower's college president meant, and it only gets done if it is given a time. Put each one on a day of this week's spread.

If you work alone, Delegate can still mean something: hand the task to a tool, batch it into one short slot late in the day, or ask for a later deadline so it stops being urgent.