The Eisenhower Matrix
What is the Eisenhower Matrix?
The Eisenhower Matrix, sometimes referred to as the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, the Eisenhower Box, or the Urgent-Important Matrix, is a task management tool that helps arrange and prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance. It consists of four categories: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. Depending on which category a task falls into, specific strategies can be applied to manage it effectively.
The Basic Idea
In our all-too-busy lives, we often find ourselves overwhelmed with everyday tasks, making it difficult to know where to start. We might prioritize the tasks we enjoy the most or the ones that take the least time. But as the day goes on, we often realize that there’s no way we’ll be able to complete everything on our to-do list.
Often, we are resistant to asking for help. We therefore bite off more than we can chew, but this can leave us burnt out or with half-complete to-do lists. We might prioritize the wrong tasks and end up having to complete the most important ones late at night. “There must be a better way,” we find ourselves thinking.
Studies of human behavior have shown that people are very good at identifying and completing tasks that are both important and urgent, and assigning a low priority to tasks that are unimportant and nonurgent.9 What we’re not so good at is prioritizing important (but perhaps not urgent) tasks over those that are urgent or feel urgent. We’re all familiar with this feeling—it’s called the ‘urgency trap’ or the ‘mere-urgency effect.’
The Eisenhower Matrix is a time-management strategy that helps you determine which tasks should be prioritized, which can be delegated, and which can be tackled at a later time—or not at all.
Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and short term! Especially when our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 address to the Century Association1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
