He commanded armed forces in WWII, served as president of the United States, and laid out systems which lead to the launch of the Interstate Highway System, the internet and NASA….all the while finding time to golf and oil paint. Dwight Eisenhower, a country boy from Kansas, managed to do it all. How? He used a simple system for prioritizing each day — and it all starts with a four-square box.
This method is a matrix, just two columns and two rows. The columns represent tasks that are urgent and not urgent, and the rows represent tasks that are important and not important. Deciding which tasks are important and urgent, or some combination of the four options, will inform the action you should take with it. The matrix will tell you what to do from there:
1- Important and urgent: Jump on it immediately.
2- Important and not urgent: Schedule a time to definitely get to it, just not right now.
3- Not important and urgent: Delegate this task, if you can.
4- Not important and not urgent: Move onto bigger things.
Bottom line: This is just a way to put your to-dos in an order that won’t eat up all your time.
Think of urgent tasks as ones you feel like you need to respond to: texts, emails, work deadlines, etc. Think of the important tasks as the ones that mean something to you and are really going to further your goals: calling your friends and family, doing research, enjoying your hobbies, etc.
“I find that the Eisenhower Method is particularly useful because it pushes me to question whether an action is really necessary,” author and success blogger James Clear writes. “Which means I’m more likely to move tasks to the ‘Delete’ quadrant rather than mindlessly repeating them.”