The Eisenhower Matrix

There must be a thousand time management tools out there. I would estimate that I’ve tried dozens, with mixed degrees of success, and I’ll bet you’ve done the same. One of my favorites is also one of the simplest, one developed by Eisenhower.

Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in World War Two, then served as US President from 1953 to 1961. He was clearly a man who knew how to get things done. And like all highly successful individuals, he was diligent about the use of his time and resources. As you might imagine, he had a system.

What Eisenhower found is that he had two kinds of problems: the urgent, and the important. “The urgent,” he said, “is seldom important, and the important is seldom urgent.” This insight led him to develop a simple four-quadrant box with the horizontal axis being “Urgent-Not urgent” and the vertical axis being “Important-Not important”. See the blue box, below.

He realized that some problems were in fact both important and urgent, and these fell into the first quadrant. These rare matters were in the nature of house-on-fire emergencies that called for “all hands on deck” flat-out response. If you don’t act quickly and decisively, you could lose it all.

(If these things happen to you all the time, you need some recalibration, and I’m happy to chat with you.)

Things which were important but not urgent fall into the second quadrant, and such matters are well managed by planning and scheduling. Of course, this only works when you actually put feet on the ground to implement the plans. The success in managing this quadrant is directly related to accomplishing big things. Gary Keller’s book “The One Thing” is a great study in this regard.

Eisenhower understood that matters which were urgent but not important fell into the third quadrant, and that the proper thing to do here was to delegate them to someone better suited to deal with them, thus freeing up his time and energy to focus on the “important quadrant”.

I don’t need to tell you about the “not urgent-not important quadrant” quadrant, also known as the “time waster” quadrant. Time you spend there is time you’ll never get back. If you find yourself frustrated with life on a regular basis, maybe you’re lallygagging too much in the fourth quadrant.

The Alignment Principle, which says that you should dwell in your unique Giftings to satisfy the unique Needs of your unique clients, is in many ways another iteration of saying you should spend as much time as you can in the “Important but not urgent” quadrant, the one which pays the biggest dividends.