The Eisenhower Principle for Prioritising Tasks

The Eisenhower Principle is a simple but effective way to manage your time and get things done. It was created by a former US President called Dwight D. Eisenhower, who knew a thing or two about getting stuff done (so they say – I didn’t know him personally 😂 ).

Many of us will be familiar with that scenario of feeling as though we’re busy all day but accomplishing little. We tend, as humans, to start our working day by prioritising the thing that’s most time sensitive, which is not always the thing that is going to get us any closer to accomplishing our goals. This is where the Eisenhower Principle comes into play.

The principle is, at its very simplest, about putting your tasks into four different categories based on how important and urgent they are. And for me, the kicker for me here was really starting to think about the difference between urgent and important. I didn’t realise until I came across the Eisenhower Principle that I had been treating both those things, incorrectly, as the same.

Here are the urgent/important categories on which the Eisenhower Principle works:

1. Urgent and important: These are the things you need to do first, like something on tight deadline or a big presentation or any important task with a compelling deadline coming up.

2. Not urgent but important: These are things that are important, but not necessarily urgent in time terms. This might be something like planning advance work or learning a new skill. Learning a new skill might be really critical to your career, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be done right now, for example.

3. Urgent but not important: These are things that need to be done quickly in time terms but that aren’t necessarily particularly important (so things like answer or returning a call).

4. Not urgent and not important: These are things that you don’t need to do at all, like checking social media or watching that latest episode of the series you’re watching.

The basic idea of the Eisenhower Principle is to focus on the tasks that are urgent and important first, then move onto the ones that are important but not urgent and work through the categories in order.

How to Categorise Your Tasks Based on Eisenhower’s Urgent Important Principles

Here’s a matrix that might help with determining how to categorise a task (and what to do about these things once categorised).

Now, if you’re a freelancer working alone with no additional resource, delegating might not be possible for you. So this doesn’t apply to everyone.

But here’s typically what I try to do with those tasks:

• Urgent and important: These become top priority tasks for me to do that day. They’re the first tasks on my to do
• Urgent but not as important: I get someone in the team to do these where possible. his might be things like replying to non urgent emails, or looking into a problem that isn’t critical but some sort of response is needed today
• Important but not urgent: I’ve been doing better the last couple of years at scheduling these tasks in and sticking with them. Things like spending some time learning the ins and outs of Google Analytics 4, for me, was a task earlier on this year. It wasn’t urgent then but I scheduled it. By scheduling these less urgent tasks in advance, I find fewer of them become “urgent” so if I stick to the schedule, it works
• Remove it: I say this with caution. What I mean is that I remove it from that particular working day. But some things that might not necessarily help me to hit professional goals (like hiking or spending time reading fiction) are important to me. More on that below! So I do try to just remove them from the working day that particular day and keep it for my down time. But equally, what’s great, is that if I schedule well and stick to it, I can often find an hour in a working day to do some of these things

But something important to remember here…

So before I talk about how I prioritise tasks, I wanted to point something out.

Things that would, in work terms, be classified as technically not important and not urgent might actually be important in other areas.

As an example, me getting out for a hike up a hill isn’t going to clear a to do list task directly, is it? And by the book, getting out for a walk should be a not urgent, not important task (like gaming or other recreational hobbies).

But sometimes I hit a wall with my productivity and getting out for a walk helps me hit the reset button and come back ready for more, working faster. So indirectly, this does help me get my work tasks done.

And even if it didn’t… burnout is a very real thing. Work life balance and time to do the things we love is important to our wellbeing.

So, my personal preference is to segment a certain number of hours in the day to my to do tasks (they’re often not all in one go) and apply the Eisenhower Principle to writing my task list for that specific timeframe. But the temptation when you start using this is to start thinking about everything in a day in these 4 categories and I think that type of thinking can easily lead to a poor work life balance.

Does the Eisenhower Principle Work?

Yes. For me, it does. Depending on whether you have the ability to delegate and how far in advance you are able to schedule, it could work well for you.

And if you cannot delegate then it may be worth just playing around with it to adapt it to yourself. 

Essentially, if you can group all tasks into urgency and importance (those 4 categories) then you can choose what action to take with each of those tasks from there!

Good luck!