# Eisenhower matrix

> A two-by-two grid that sorts work by urgency and importance to help decide what to do, schedule, delegate or drop.

## What it means

The 2×2 of urgent and important with its usual actions (do, schedule, delegate, drop), plus the UK and Australian name ‘prioritisation matrix’. Origin, verified: Eisenhower’s address at Evanston, 19 Aug 1954 (The American Presidency Project) — “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” — introduced as “quoting the statement of a former college president”. Any statement about who turned it into a grid later (often credited to Covey’s time management matrix) needs its own opened source. Honest limits: urgency is often someone else’s priority; ‘important’ needs a goal to be measured against.

## A practical example

A client deadline is urgent and important; planning next quarter is important but not urgent; a low-value notification is neither.

## Put it into practice

- Name the concrete situation before applying the label. Eisenhower matrix is useful only when it changes a choice, boundary or next action.
- Make the state visible: write the owner, time, source or stopping condition down instead of relying on memory.
- Review what happened. Keep the part that reduced ambiguity and change the part that added ceremony without helping the work.

## How it relates to Plexii

One thing now ranks open desks by Urgency plus Importance (one to five dots each), then due date, then the most recent change (/help/home-widget-one-thing-now). Link /tools/priority-matrix.

## Sources

- [Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 Evanston address](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-second-assembly-the-world-council-churches-evanston-illinois)