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)

The Two Axes

importance : cumulative impact over the long term;

contribution to the success of dependencies

Important items in one's to-do list are relied upon by other items, and so their potential impact — including the consequences of failure — build over time.

urgency : the need for prompt attention to achieve a result

or to address and resolve a problem

Urgent items are usually less important, because they have lesser intrinsic value, or because there are no other dominoes that will fall. However, they must be saved quickly if they are to be saved at all. There is a short window of opportunity to get their value, usually with a specific time deadline.

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, "Put First Things First"²,³,⁴ uses the 2×2 matrix with somewhat simpler labels ("Do", "Plan", "Delegate", "Eliminate") to give similar advice, emphasizing that "Plan" items should usually be done earlier than "delegate" items, and even invokes concepts of personal integrity.

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_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People Wikipedia, "The 7 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 Sep 17.

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