Eisenhower matrix
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You wouldn't find a prioritization technique more popular than the Eisenhower matrix – famously employed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States.
This workflow helps you quickly identify the activities you should focus on and the ones you should ignore. First, assign to each task whether it is important or not important, and urgent or not urgent. The matrix will then tell you what to do with each task.
| Important | Urgent | Section |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ | ✅ | Do Now |
| ❌ | ✅ | Delegate / Push Back |
| ✅ | ❌ | Do Later |
| ❌ | ❌ | Avoid / Eliminate |
To set values for importance and urgency, open the task detail and pick the value on the matrix. Alternatively, select the task in the list and move it between sections using Shift+Arrow Right and Shift+Arrow Left keyboard shortcuts.
Once you assign importance and urgency to each of your planned tasks, this is how your list will look like:
Some people spend their whole day in this workflow. Others use this workflow only occasionally when they lose the sense of what is important while primarily using other workflow, such as our Kanban workflow.
Prioritization
This workflow features our signature automatic prioritization. Tasks are sorted first by their urgency/importance value, then their assigned priority, and lastly by their age.
The task with the highest urgency will be highlighted in bold in the list as the next task to work on. This can be disabled in the settings.
As in other workflows, start working on tasks from the top. If you have trouble getting started on a task, start a timer.
To quickly increase a task's priority, use Shift+Arrow Up keyboard shortcut.
No need to look at tasks that are not relevant now — collapse any section by double-clicking its name. This works for all sections in all workflows.
Estimation
To see the sum of estimates for all the tasks in a particular section, hover over the section name and the total time will show.