The Urgent-Important Decision Matrix: Make decision and Be Productive in Your Life

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Many of you may have heard that quotation from the former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Born in Texas and raised in Kansas while spent his childhood in a farm town of Abilene, Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of America’s greatest military commanders and the 34th President of the United States. During his life, Eisenhower was known as a productive man as he had served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, became the Chief Staff of the U.S. Army, attended the Columbia University as President, lead the NATO as Supreme Commander, and the lists can go on.

He is an incredibly great man for sure, having those accomplishments during his life, making him no ordinary man at all. However, how is he related to becoming productive and decisive? Can we be like him? Well, the choice is yours to be great or not. Eisenhower has left a great example, and it can be one of the shortcut ways for us to be as great as he is. I can’t guarantee that you will be as great as him though, well — the choice is yours. If to be successful is easy, then everyone should have been successful already.

Before we begin, let me give you some background emphasis. On a daily basis, mainly on a professional basis, we have always been breath and work in a competitive environment. It’s undoubtedly that every people have situations when they have many things to handle and do during a short period of time. Chasing deadlines, serving boss requests, maintaining the balance of work and family, getting home stuff done, or making up time to keep the body in shape. Although there are some of us who don’t have the responsibilities of working for life such as elementary students, they, in fact — still have things to like partially studying, doing homework, attending courses, while maintaining how much time they can do to play. In this world of constant, being organized is no longer adult matters; it is a demand and a compulsory that every people must know what it is and how to do it.

Then, how do we get organized and be productive? If it were me, I’d say it again — the choice is yours. To be productive has always come from within yourself, to choose to do important things that will benefit you in the future rather than playing around while concerning nonsense about what-to-do first. Hopefully, we don’t slightly need to do what I say because Eisenhower Principle can help us with that. More accurate, more powerful, more simple, and way more well-reliable.

Back then, Eisenhower was faced with many tough decisions concerning the tasks he had to focus on every day. Since he was a President and way long before that, he was a Commander. These positions demand him to be critical, to be ready for whatever comes, and to make things done while maintaining his intelligent state. It leads him to create a system that helps him to prioritize his tasks based upon urgency and importance — a decision-making method based on the importance and urgency of what’s on your to-do list that is called the Urgent-Important Decision Matrix, or commonly known as the Eisenhower Matrix. While helping you to filter, this matrix also allows you to identify tasks that you should either proceed or leave undone. The matrix consists of a square divided into four quadrants, arranged thusly:

The matrix consists of 4 quadrant works labeled by two words separately on its vertical and horizontal sides. This Eisenhower’s Matrix layout was popularized by Stephen Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In that book, Covey created a decision matrix to help individuals make the distinction between what’s important and not important and what’s urgent and not urgent.

How to use the Eisenhower Matrix to Be Productive

a. First, make a list of everything you want to do.

Example:

What I want to do today:

- Submitting assignment

- Exercise

- Responding to some emails

- Playing some video games.

b. Then, categorize them based on the following criteria based on the explanation below:

Quadrant 1 (Do it) — Urgent and important. Quadrant 1 must be filled with activities that are both urgent and important. These activities need immediate action and can possibly impact your future goal and career if you don’t do it right away. So, this Quadrant has the activities that need to be done first and as soon as possible.

Qualifications: crisis, deadlines, problems, disputes, jobs.

Quadrant 2 (Decide it) — Important but not urgent. Quadrant 2 must be filled with activities that are important but not urgent. These activities are important and have a thing to do with your future goals, but it doesn’t need immediate action. Usually, you would like to invest your time doing these activities in order to achieve your future goals.

Qualifications: self-improvement and future-planning.

Quadrant 3 (Delegate it) — Urgent but not important. Quadrant 3 must be filled with activities that are urgent but not important. These activities need immediate action but have nothing to do with your future goals. Mostly, this Quadrant has the activities that involved people’s interests, helping them with their own priorities and self-goals.

Qualifications: people’s interests and people’s needs.

Quadrant 4 (Delete it) — Neither urgent nor important. Quadrant 4 must be filled with activities that are neither urgent nor important. It means this Quadrant has the least important activities. If you don’t do these activities, it will not impact your work careers and future goals. These activities are only distractions that have no pressure on you neither help you to be prepared for your future goals.

Qualifications: entertainment, games, unimportant matters.

c. After you get to categorize the lists based on how the quadrants work, put them on each four quadrant work:

d. Now, you get your Eisenhower Matrix fixing your concern.

How should we define Urgent and Important?

When you have something that needs to be done soon, it is called urgent. It requires immediate action. You need to immediately to finish this, and you have to finish that. Understanding what urgent is, means you being fast-paced, action-oriented, and fluid.

When you have something that is so valuable and can contribute to your long-term mission and future goals, it is called Important. The easiest qualification to determine something is important or not is by understanding the after-effect impacts might occur if you don’t do the thing.

Keypoint:

We tend to fall into the trap of feeling overwhelmed by our activities because we spontaneously respond to urgency more readily than we respond to importance. In this state, we often lost both our sense of productivity and effectivity by working first on unimportant things that we think important while leaving the things that actually important untouched.

Copyright, Fernando Ramadhan, 2020.