If you always find yourself busy, full of obligations to fulfill and find difficulty in organizing your tasks, then this article was made for you. In the next few lines, we will present an essential tool for those who have difficulty prioritizing tasks and making bold decisions: the Eisenhower Matrix.

Read on to understand what this matrix is and how it can help you organize your daily routines and improve your productivity.

What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

Created by the 34th President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool used to prioritize tasks and guide the decision-making process within organizations.

We can sumarize what the Eisenhower Matrix is as a way of categorizing the activities that need to be done according to two basic criteria: urgency and importance.

The Eisenhower Matrix intends to prioritize tasks that are urgent and important. This tool creates a kind of sorting of your tasks to avoid wasting time on tasks that have less priority or are less urgent.

The tasks considered important are those which are directly related to reaching a certain goal or objective. At the same time, urgent tasks are directly focused on the deadline set for their completion.

With this in mind, it is up to the Eisenhower Matrix to better organize your routine so that you can prioritize the tasks of greater importance and urgency, thereby positively impacting on your productivity.

Main benefits of the Eisenhower Matrix

Prioritization of the most urgent and important tasks for the company

Improvement in the productivity indexes;

Greater organization and clarity of activities;

Resolution of eventual problems;

Greater agility in task execution;

Favoring reason over emotion;

More assertive decision-making.

See more: What are decision-making processes within organizations and 5 tips on how to do them in practice

Step by step: how to create the Eisenhower Matrix?

Now that you’re introduced, what is the Eisenhower Matrix? check out below a very simple and easy step-by-step guide on how to make the Eisenhower Matrix.

Step 1 – Draw a Cartesian plane

The first step in building your Eisenhower Matrix is to draw a Cartesian plane. In other words, make a square and divide it into two axes (horizontal and vertical), forming four quadrants.

The vertical line represents the importance of the tasks, while the horizontal line represents urgency.

Step 2 – Define the urgent and important tasks

With the Cartesian plane drawn, it’s time to list the tasks and categorize them. We will start with the first quadrant, which should contain tasks that are important and urgent.

These are the tasks that deserve priority and cannot be put off.

Step 3 – Establish the tasks that are important but not urgent

In the second quadrant, you should mark which tasks are important but do not need to be done urgently. Here we are referring to medium and long-term tasks

For example, handing in your department’s annual balance sheet and financial projections when it is still only September.

Step 4 – Establish non-essential but urgent tasks

In the third quadrant, place the tasks that are not so important but still require to be done urgently.

Here are the tasks that deserve priority, because the deadline is running out.

Step 5 – Define the non-important and non-urgent tasks

Finally, you should mark in the fourth quadrant with all the tasks that are neither important nor urgent. This step of the Matrix is important so that you know what you should not waste your time on.

The tasks in this last quadrant can be discarded or performed in the long term, without urgency.

Does that make it clear how to make an Eisenhower Matrix? Remember that this is a tool that you should always have at hand to better organize yourself and prevent your tasks from piling up.

The Eisenhower Matrix is an excellent way to manage your time, but there are others.

STRATWs One is a corporate performance management software that, among other advantages, helps you manage your time.

Check out some of its functionalities and applications:

Integrate people, operation, and strategy;

Find opportunities for improvement;

Manage meetings and project portfolios;

Create and monitor KPIs for processes, projects, and people;

Share information with agility and transparency;

Focus on the pursuit of the results that your company seeks to achieve.

Do you want more tips on time management? Then, download our free e-book: The 4 biggest enemies of entrepreneur productivity