Do you ever find yourself so caught-up trying to deal with day-to-day tasks that you struggle with advancing your long-term goals?
Then you’re not alone- a 2018 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research took a look at what kinds of tasks people chose to prioritize. The study found that participants were more likely to pick urgent, unimportant tasks over more important tasks that didn’t invoke a sense of urgency.
This phenomenon was coined the “Mere-Urgency Effect”, and it describes our innate tendency to prioritize time-sensitive tasks over those that aren’t time-sensitive— even when the less urgent tasks provide more value.
Also referred to as the Eisenhower Matrix, the Urgent-Important Matrix is a way of striking a healthy balance between these important and time-sensitive tasks. But before we jump into how to use the matrix, let’s talk about the big picture.
First, what are your long-term priorities?
Before we get into the matrix, it’s important that we actually know what our long-term priorities are. If our future plans are vague and abstract, if our destination is unclear, we can’t lay out a clear path to get there. Some key things to consider:
- What are the three biggest things you’d like to accomplish this year?
- What do you not want to do? Are there habits or activities you’d like to avoid?
- What activities do I want to do more of?
- Are there any activities I’m spending more time on than I’d like?
Your long-term goals don’t need to be centered around accomplishments- they can just as well be to spend more time with your family or to have more free weekends to go fishing. The only requirement is that your goals be as clear as possible.
Knowing what your long-term goals are, let’s get into how the Urgent-Important Matrix can help you.
What is the Urgent Important Matrix?
The Urgent-Important Matrix is also known by another name: the Eisenhower Matrix. Before he was sworn in as the 34th President of the United States, Eisenhower served as an army general during World War II.
Eisenhower created this matrix as a way to prioritize what needed to be done based on a task’s urgency and importance. It was important for Eisenhower that he not lose sight of the bigger picture and fall victim to the mere-urgency effect—this led to the creation of his matrix.
While the Urgent-Important Matrix has been around for a while, it gained new popularity thanks to Stephen Covey’s book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. In it, he writes that time management can be best encapsulated in this phrase: “Organize and execute around priorities”. Now that we’ve thought about what our priorities are, we can properly allocate our time and resources to the tasks that aid us in achieving them.
How to Use the Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix is composed of four quadrants that are sorted by columns for urgency and rows for importance. The intersection of these rows and columns determines how important and how urgent a task is.
1. Urgent and Important: Anything in this quadrant should be your top-priority. Tasks that are both time-sensitive and important will be taken care of first.
- Ex: Needing to call an important business client before the end of the day
2. Important but not Urgent: These tasks should be saved for after you’ve completed the first quadrant. Once the time-sensitive important tasks are done, you schedule a time to work on the less-urgent but still important tasks.
- Ex: Planning a family vacation for next summer
3. Urgent but not Important: Tasks that need to be taken care of soon but aren’t a priority. Delegate these if possible.
- Ex: Needing to respond to an email or return a call
4. Neither Important or Urgent: If the task holds little importance and you don’t need to do it now, remove it from your to-do list.
- Ex: Browsing social media
The Most Important Quadrant
According to Covey, the four quadrants do not share the same level of importance. In fact, he urges that we delegate and plan our lives so that we shrink the number of tasks in all quadrants to make room for quadrant 2.
Covey describes the second quadrant as “the heart of effective personal management”. These are the tasks that focus on achieving our long-term priorities and are future-minded. But to make time for our important tasks, we need to take-away time from Quadrants 3 and 4.
Eliminating tasks from Quadrant 4 is a no-brainer; these activities are neither important nor do they need to be done right now.
Quadrant 3, however, is a bit trickier. Just as the Mere Urgency Effect stipulates, we have an in-born tendency to see time-sensitive tasks as being more important than they are. Therefore, we need to take initiative to asses the tasks that come our way and examine how much value they hold for us. If the issue is time-sensitive but you recognize that saying no to the task will not result in any negative consequences, then consider dropping it from your to-do list.
As for the first quadrant, these urgent tasks need to be completed as they pop-up. While planning ahead can help minimize them, last-minute emergencies can’t be completely avoided. Tackle these as they appear before returning your focus to Quadrant 2.
Conclusion
In our busy lives it’s becoming increasingly crucial to learn to balance between time-sensitive tasks and those that benefit us in the long-term. Using the urgent-important matrix we can help refocus ourselves and look at the bigger picture instead of letting everyday busywork eat up our time.