Prioritizing your work with the Eisenhower Matrix
I recently wrote about using the MoSCoW method for prioritizing work at the project level. But how do you prioritize your own individual work? The method that has worked best for me is known as the Eisenhower Matrix.
The Eisenhower Matrix explained
The Eisenhower Matrix requires making two binary choices about a task: is it of high or low importance and is it of high or low urgency? The prioritization then goes like this:
- High importance and high urgency. Do these first.
- High importance and low urgency. Schedule these.
- Low importance and high urgency. Delegate these.
- Low importance and low urgency. Don’t do these.
Sometimes you can delegate priority 3 tasks to others in the project, but often you can’t. Those either get done once you finish priority 1 or you end up not doing them. Not everything that’s urgent is important.
I prefer to think of category 4 as “do these when you have the time”, but you can’t do everything you think of, so category 4 is a good place to drop things if you have to. It’s okay to not do things.
Evaluating tasks
On it’s face, the Eisenhower Matrix is very simple. In practice, making the choices about importance and urgency cause a lot of hangups. They don’t need to. Make a quick judgement and refine as you go. The point is to avoid hyperfixating on the act of prioritization so you can get stuff done instead.
Importance
Importance, in particular, is a place where everyone struggles at first. Everything seems important, and there’s a degree of emotional vulnerability in calling some of your tasks “low importance.” It’s a short trip from there to thinking “all of my work is unimportant.”
But here’s the thing: it’s not called “unimportant”, it’s called “low importance.” Everything is relative, so it’s a matter of labeling the less important tasks in your total task universe. If it helps, think of it in terms of impacts down the line. If skipping a task creates a lot of additional work or a time crunch or prevents a key thing from happening on time, that task has high importance. If skipping a task is manageably inconvenient, then it’s of low importance.
For example, as I was thinking about this section, I realized that some of my regular tasks are less important than I labeled them. Posting a reminder about the weekly project maintainer meeting has some importance, but the people who need to be there already have it on their calendar. If I forget one week and other community members don’t join, that’s not ideal, but there’s no real harm. The meetings are recorded anyway. I’ve been using the Eisenhower Matrix for years and I still tend to bias toward high importance.
Urgency
Urgency tends to be easier to manage. We know that some things can wait. Still, it’s sometimes difficult to decide how urgent is urgent. One good rule is this: if there’s an actual deadline looming, the task is urgent. If you’d just like to have it done, it’s not urgent. The looming deadline part is perhaps the trickiest. If a conference’s call for proposals closes in a month, writing your proposal is probably not an urgent task. If it closes at the end of the day, then writing your proposal is urgent. But what if it’s at the end of the week? Or in two weeks? That can be harder to judge.
The thing to remember is that task evaluations are not static. As deadlines approach, tasks can go from low urgency to high urgency. If you complete all of your high importance tasks and no new ones appear, then some of your low importance tasks become high importance relative to what’s left.
Limitations of the Eisenhower Matrix
Like any framework, the Eisenhower Matrix isn’t perfect. It is for making daily decisions on how to prioritize tasks, not to provide one true understanding of the importance and urgency of everything in your life. It’s power and weakness are in its simplicity.
One thing that the Eisenhower Matrix ignores is the time necessary to complete a task. One high importance, high urgency task might take all day (though maybe you should decompose it into smaller tasks). Would accomplishing 10 shorter tasks of lower individual importance or urgency have a greater impact in aggregate? Maybe. The Eisenhower Matrix doesn’t tell you what to do if your priority 1 tasks require more than your entire day. Then again, maybe that’s a sign that you’ve over-importanced some tasks.
How do you decide which of several tasks within a priority category to do first? The Eisenhower Matrix doesn’t say. You can just pick one. If you feel the need to rank them, the refining criteria in the MoSCoW post can help. The main point is that you don’t need to recursively evaluate each tasks until you have a strictly ordered list. That wastes time that you could be spending doing the actual work.
The Eisenhower Matrix also fails to account for how draining or fun a task is. All tasks give the joy of dopamine when you mark them done, but some are actually fun to complete and others are dreadful. I, for example, enjoy posting the recordings and notes from meetings but dread making phone calls. You won’t go to jail for not following your prioritized list exactly, though. If you need some joyful tasks to get you through the drudgery, you can make that choice.
This post’s featured photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash.