Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

I don't know about you, but it seems that for every item I check off my to-do list, there are five more that pop up from various locations. Maybe it's a request from a colleague, an idea I got from reading an article that I'd like to implement in my work, a suggestion from a supervisor or mentor, or a commitment to family or friends that arose from a conversation. Whatever the origin of these tasks, they have a tendency to snowball if we aren't careful about paring them down (or learning to say "no", which is a thing I am very bad at and I promise will someday be a blog post of its very own).

When things pile up, it can quickly feel impossible to accomplish any of them, let alone all of them. If only there were a neat tool to help distinguish between which activities are high priority and which we shouldn't even bother with.

​It turns out, there is!

Urgent-Important Matrices can help us prioritize
This helpful tool allows us to organize our tasks into four categories, which then make it easy to see where they should fall on our schedules (or if they belong there at all).  These matrices are also often called Eisenhower Matrices, as former President Eisenhower popularized the idea in a speech.

These matrices are straightforward to use. Take your to-do list, in whatever form it is in right now, and then go down the list and ask yourself the following two questions about each task:

1. Is it urgent? Some other ways to ask this question include: is there an approaching deadline? Is someone else waiting on me to accomplish this? Will there be immediate consequences for not doing this? Mark each item as U for "urgent" or NU for "not urgent."
2. Is it important? This one is a lot harder to distinguish, so another way of thinking about this is to relate it to your own goals and values. Does this task support me in  achieving a personal or professional goal?  Will this task contribute in a meaningful way to a project that I care about or need to accomplish for my long-term career growth or personal development? Now mark each item as I for "important" or NI for "not important."​

Now, every task on your list should have two short descriptors next to it: a U/NU and a I/NI (if you would like to color code or use stickers or any other way to distinguish these categories, be my guest! Whatever will make this process useful and rewarding for you). You can then place each item on your list onto the Urgent-Important Matrix.

The matrix shows you, based on your two determinations of urgent/not urgent and important/not important, what you should do with that task. If the task is both urgent and important, do it now! If the task is important but not urgent, schedule it to do later! If the task is urgent but not important, delegate it! And finally, if the task is neither urgent nor important, then why is it on your list? No one will care if it doesn't happen, so don't do it.

Of course, sometimes delegating can be hard to do, especially if you are the most junior person at your work or don't have a strong support system to rely on. If you find yourself with lots of urgent but not important tasks and no one to delegate to, you may need to talk with your supervisor about workload and the team's priorities, or you may need to try to cultivate a better support system or invest in some technologies that can assist you.

​Sometimes, none of these are feasible options, and that's a really hard situation to be in. I've been there, and all I can say is you have to decide whether it's worth staying in that position and whether sticking it out until your position changes is a good idea or a bad one. But at least you can try to focus more of your energy on those things that lie in the "important" half of the urgent-important matrix.

If not everything can get done, focus on the important over the urgent.

Was this tool helpful for you? I know it helps me to lay things out in such a visual way. Let me know in the comments!