How to Prioritize: The Urgent and Important Matrix

What do you do when everything is important and needs your attention? With a mile-long to-do list, deadlines, and projects screaming for prioritization, keeping your head above water has become increasingly difficult.

One of the biggest challenges you will face in your jobs and life is learning how to prioritize when everything seems like a high-priority matter. That is where proper prioritization comes in—when you can determine the level of importance and urgency of a task or event. In this blog post, you learn about the urgent and important matrix and about the Eisenhower decision matrix, as well as how to use it. 

The difference between important and urgent

Before going into how you can effectively prioritize tasks and events, let’s learn the difference between an important task and an urgent task.

An important task or event is something that contributes to your long-term goals, values, and missions, while urgent tasks are those that need to be handled immediately. While we respond to important events from a place of calm and rationality, our response to urgent tasks is typically hurried and defensive, with a narrowly focused mindset.

The Eisenhower Decision matrix

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Aside from being famous for this quote, Eisenhower is also famous for the “Eisenhower Decision Principle,” which is the basis for this blog post. The urgent and important matrix was first popularized in Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The matrix is made of four quadrants and helps individuals make the distinction between what is important and what’s not important, and what is urgent and what’s not urgent. Learn how each of these quadrants can help you prioritize the right things.

• Urgent and important tasks

Urgent and important tasks are things that need immediate attention but work towards your personal and career long-term goals. Some urgent and important examples include a call from your child’s school principal, a term paper deadline, or rushing a family member to the emergency room. By being proactive and taking care of these tasks as soon as you can, you can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend dealing with them. These are not the types of tasks you push forward. 

• Not urgent but important tasks

Not-so-urgent but important tasks are typically centred on activities that strengthen relationships, improve yourself, and make plans for the future. These tasks don’t necessarily have a deadline but help you work toward the long term. This may include personal development, school or career goals, and your life’s purpose. These tasks come second to important and urgent tasks.

• Urgent and not-important tasks

These are tasks that require our immediate attention but are not contributors to our long-term plans and goals. Tasks that fall in this third quadrant are mostly interruptions from other people; they involve you helping them achieve their long-term goals. Such tasks include phone calls, text messages, a friend who needs help with an assignment, etc. Most people are easily sucked into these tasks while losing sight of what is important. You need to learn to balance these out with other tasks.

• Not urgent and not important tasks

These are your “goof-around” tasks! They are things that aren’t urgent or important. They do not need your immediate attention, nor do they help you fulfill your long-term goals. Tasks that fall into this category are primarily distractions. They include watching a movie, going through hours’ worth of content on TikTok, or going on shopping sprees.

Act…

We challenge you to use this urgent and important matrix to help organize your tasks and activities for this week. Before engaging in an activity, ask yourself whether it is important or urgent, and then act accordingly. I guarantee that you will witness an increase in productivity by the time you put Eisenhower’s matrix to the test.