Priority Matrix

The Eisenhower method is a simple set of categories for tasks or actions that could be performed, arranged to make it easy to distinguish such things as unimportant interruptions. President Eisenhower said,

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.¹

Out of this, various business school and personal growth techniques developed a simple 2×2 classification matrix:

	URGENT	NOT URGENT
IMPORTANT	Emergency (Do ASAP)	Plannable (Add to schedule)
NOT IMPORTANT	Interruption (Delegate)	Time-waster (Do during "free time", or not at all)

Of Course It's Not So Simple

In the real world our urgency and importance are seldom black-and-white. This 3×3 grid is probably closer to what people actually do when applying the priority matrix technique:

	URGENT	TIME-SENSITIVE	NOT URGENT
CRUCIAL	Emergency (Do ASAP)	Partly Preemptive (Add to to-do list)	Plannable (Add to schedule)
SIGNIFICANT	Mentorable (Meet with trainee immediately)	Exemplify (Do it yourself in others' awareness	Postpone (Reconsider later)
INESSENTIAL	Interruption (Delegate as ASAP)	Commonplace (Delegate as time-sensitive)	Time-waster (Do during "free time", or not at all)

Other Versions

This "urgent vs. important" technique has been widely repeated.

Covey's Seven Habits number 3 "First Things First"²,³,⁴

Footnotes

1 : Dwight D. Eisenhower (August 19, 1954). Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, on archive.org.

2 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People Wikipedia, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", encyclopedia article.

3 : http://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php "The 7 Habits for Highly Effective People" on the official Stephen Covey website.

4 : http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/7-habits/7-habits.htm White Dove Books, summary of the Seven Habits book with a chart showing Urgent vs. Important and the 4 quadrants.

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2025 Aug 21.

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