Presence - Visual Tools for Focus - The Eisenhower Matrix

Nov 7, 2021

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Do, Decide, Delegate, Drop

Here’s another Visual Tool for Focus that will help you understand importance and urgency. It is very similar to the Value vs. Effort Matrix I spoke about a while ago.

It’s another 2D grid, and resulting four quadrants. This time we map importance on the vertical, and urgency on the horizontal.

It’s attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower due to his quote:

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

The items that are high importance and high urgency will sit in that to left quadrant. Those you need to do.

The items that are high importance and low urgency you can decide on. Ignore for now? Break down into smaller chunks?

Those items with low importance and high urgency are great to delegate to automation, or another person.

And those items that have low importance and low urgency, well you can dropthem.

How-To

The how-to should sound familiar if you’ve read previous issues. Use whatever you have. The nearest pen and paper. Stickie notes on a wall/whiteboard. Go fast and iterate, nothing is forever and set in stone here.

Protip - Use the Eisenhower Matrix and the Value vs. Effort in conjunction with each other. Let’s say you have a lot of important and urgent items in you Eisenhower Matrix Do quadrant. You can move those into the Value vs. Effort Matrix to understand another, deeper level of prioritization.

The Audio Version