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Do you ever struggle to focus on what's truly important when multiple tasks demand your attention?
For example, let's say you're faced with two tasks: Task A has a short deadline that demands immediate attention, while Task B has no due date but has long-term benefits for your project.
What do you do?
Due to a phenomenon called the mere urgency effect, you are very likely to spend your time on Task A, even if it's not profitable.
Luckily, there's a simple tool to help: the Eisenhower Matrix.
This decision-making framework helps prioritize tasks, ensuring that you focus on what matters most, whether it's a task with a short deadline or a long-term project. With the Eisenhower Matrix, you can constantly evaluate how you spend your time and ensure you're always working on the most critical tasks.
What is the Eisenhower Matrix?
The Eisenhower Matrix is a decision-making framework that prioritizes tasks based on their importance and urgency.
The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent-Important Matrix, was inspired by a speech given by President Dwight Eisenhower in which he highlighted the difference between urgent and important tasks.
Stephen Covey, the co-founder of Franklin Covey, further developed this concept in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The matrix helps individuals prioritize their tasks and manage their time more effectively by categorizing them into four quadrants based on their level of urgency and importance.
This method can be helpful for those who struggle with procrastination, tend to focus on non-essential tasks, or need to manage their time more efficiently.
It helps you allocate your time to what matters by segmenting tasks into four quadrants:
- Urgent & important: These are tasks with a significant impact that need your attention now. For example, a vendor cancels on shipping concrete a day before your building project starts.
- Important & not urgent: These tasks have a long-term effect but don't need to be taken care of immediately. They usually have no/distant deadlines, e.g., weekly planning.
- Urgent & unimportant: These tasks need immediate attention, e.g., an impromptu phone call.
- Not urgent & unimportant: These are tasks that you can do without and don't directly contribute to your progress, e.g., clearing emails as they come in.
Why is the Eisenhower Matrix effective for time management?
The Eisenhower Matrix is an effective time management strategy that prevents cognitive tunneling, reduces the mere urgency effect, and eliminates busy work.
- It prevents cognitive tunneling: When you are under stress and juggling multiple tasks, your attention and mental bandwidth narrow. This phenomenon is called tunneling—where we focus on what’s right in front of us and become unaware of critical information. Plotting your tasks in the Eisenhower Matrix ensures you are not choosing the trivial over the vital.
- It reduces the mere urgency effect: Due to the mere urgency effect, people who need to choose between urgent tasks and important tasks are very likely to select urgent tasks even when they have fewer benefits. The Eisenhower Matrix ensures that you do not rush to act on what is urgent but pay attention to what is most impactful.
- It helps avoid the busyness trap: Researchers found that people perceived effort as valuable no matter the impact. Using the Eisenhower Matrix prevents you from falling into the busyness trap by making you evaluate how important each task is before you start working on them.
Prioritizing important tasks over urgent tasks
When managing multiple projects, it can be challenging to differentiate between urgent and important tasks. For instance, you may need to attend team meetings, respond to clients' feedback, resolve conflicts between stakeholders, create project schedules, and assist team members facing blockers.
In an article published in Harvard Business Review, Ellen Auster and Shannon Auster-Weiss suggest defining important tasks by their probability of success, impact, value alignment, cost, risk, or must-have vs. nice-to-have. Conversely, urgency can be determined by the consequences or benefits of completing or delaying tasks or set time frames.
In project management, an urgent task demands immediate attention and has a deadline. On the other hand, an important task affects the project's success or failure and helps achieve the project's goals.
Once you have established the definitions of urgent and essential, you can prioritize your tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix.
Quick win
Use this free template from Miro to prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance.
Free templateQuadrant 1: Do important and urgent tasks
Important and urgent tasks need to be done right away.
They demand immediate attention and significantly impact your projects, e.g., missing deadlines or service downtime. They can be highly stressful and steal time from other tasks you should focus on.
Quadrant 1 is quicksand. "As long as you focus on quadrant 1, it keeps getting bigger and bigger until it dominates you," says Covey.
To reduce these tasks, you need to identify the root cause of the problem:
🚩Are there flaws in your team's processes that lead to delays?
🚩 Is a team member consistently delivering tasks late?
🚩Are there flaws in your project planning process?
🚩Are stakeholders consistently changing the direction of the project?
Investigating the causes of these issues and creating long-term solutions can help you avoid being buried in quadrant 1 tasks. For example, documenting knowledge and processes in an internal wiki for quick reference can be more effective than constantly responding to questions throughout the day.
Float's Director of Customer Success, Alison Prator, prioritizes creating internal documentation of processes over the quick-fire strategy of answering questions as they come in.
"As we've been hiring, training, and onboarding, we've recognized the need to document our knowledge of day-to-day tasks and processes.
Whenever there's a question on how things work, a team member should be able to reference our internal manual rather than relying on someone else to share their knowledge. As our team matures and our processes are defined, we expect to spend less time building out these manuals and internal documentation and move to updating and refining them as necessary."
Quadrant 2: Schedule not urgent and important tasks
Schedule time to do essential tasks like weekly planning, creating critical documentation, or reviewing a past project. If you don't intentionally make them for these tasks, they'll remain unnoticed until too late.
Take, for example, the act of planning your week. If you keep putting it off, you might rush through each day unsure of your priorities and not get much done. To avoid this trap, list tasks you absolutely need to do to make your project a success. Try to keep it to three to four items so you don't get overwhelmed. Then schedule some time on your calendar to work on them.
Fit them into several 25-minute time boxes using the Pomodoro Technique. Alternatively, you can block out some time at the end of the week.
"I keep a recurring task and time for a weekly review. I default to Fridays for this, where I review and plan my tasks for the upcoming week," says Michael Luchen, Float's director of product.
Breaking down these tasks into smaller steps can help overcome procrastination and ease anxiety.
Quadrant 3: Delegate or postpone urgent and not important tasks
In Quadrant 3 of the Eisenhower Matrix are the urgent but not important tasks. These tasks tend to consume a lot of time and can distract you from working on important things.
Instead of reacting to every urgent task, it's essential to prioritize and delegate or postpone them if possible.
When faced with urgent tasks, Michael D. Watkins, author of The First 90 Days, suggests asking two questions:
- What is the best use of my time right now?
- How important is this today? How important will it be three months and six months down the road?
If the answer to these two questions is no, you should get to them later or get someone to help.
If you choose to delay a task, ensure that it is not a blocker for the project. Researchers Daniel R. Kennedy and Andrea L. Porter recommend that while dealing with the illusion of urgency, administrators pay attention to how their decisions affect others. While it might not be urgent and important to answer an email, delaying your reply might cause a team member to stop what they're doing, potentially holding up the project.
If you delegate a task to someone else, avoid micromanaging them. Instead, provide clear outcomes, guidelines, accountability, resources, and consequences, and trust them to handle the task. This approach, known as stewardship delegation, can save you time and allow you to focus on leading your projects.
While this might require a bit of effort, it is worth it in the long term. You'll have more time to focus on leading your projects.
Pro tip
Use the filter option in Float to find team members with the skill and availability to take on a task.
Find out moreQuadrant 4: Not urgent and not important tasks
Quadrant 4 is often the most neglected regarding time management, but it's essential to recognize that not all tasks are worth doing. Many tasks in this quadrant can be distractions that take up valuable time that could be better spent on more critical work.
For example, multiple meetings without agendas. According to research by Fellow, managers attend over 16 meetings every week! That's a huge time suck.
To address this, it's essential to identify which tasks fall into this quadrant and consider deleting or delegating them.
Instead of scheduling meetings to brainstorm ideas, Tony Rule, Float's senior technical product manager, defaults to async communication.
"If people try and schedule me on a meeting, I'll often go back with a short Loom with a proposed solution, then get a response from the person with a refined solution that is better. Then no meeting is required."
➡️ Learn how to create a culture with fewer meetings and more time for deep work.
How Float's engineering team prioritizes important projects over urgent projects
Float's Head of Engineering, Colin Ross, explains his approach to prioritizing tasks and how his team separates the urgent from the important.
"One way we prioritize is by pre-allocating time to some of these commitments even when we don't know the details.
For example, for the last product cycle and the next one, we have a support champion each week who is the dedicated point of contact for any customer issues that come in and whose responsibility it is that week to make progress on the various open issues that aren't to anyone else. Within that structure, the focus is more on urgent issues—ensuring we create a good experience for the customer. That said, for problems that are less urgent but regarded as important (e.g., a shortcoming in the product), we have our UX wins process that the ticket can be moved to for validation and, hopefully, resolution.
In general, when planning a future cycle, if we are doing our job well, there should be little to no urgent work - external dependencies that we need to respond to should generally be able to be folded into the regular cycle cadence. If something is urgent, it's usually both urgent and important (e.g., a severe security vulnerability); in that case, we need to make time for it."
"Essentially, we want to spend most of our time on important things. We acknowledge that urgent things do come along, so we make sure we devote some time to dealing with them so that they don't impact the delivery of important work." — Colin Ross, Float
Mastering task prioritization with the Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple yet powerful tool for prioritizing tasks and increasing productivity.
By differentiating between urgent and important tasks and focusing on the latter, you can free up your time and energy to tackle the most critical work that will drive the success of your projects. Remember to regularly review and refine your priorities, and feel free to delegate or eliminate tasks that don't align with your goals.
With the Eisenhower Matrix in your toolkit, you can achieve your project objectives with better workload management.
