Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961.
Before becoming President, Eisenhower was a five-star general in the United States Army, served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and was responsible for planning and participating in the wars in North Africa, France, and Germany.
In addition, he served as President of Columbia University, became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and somehow found time to pursue his hobbies of golf and oil painting.
Eisenhower had an extraordinary ability to maintain his productivity not just for weeks or months, but for decades. For that reason, it is no surprise that his methods for time management, work, and productivity have been studied by many.
His most famous productivity strategy is called the Eisenhower Box, and it’s a simple decision-making tool you can use right now.
The Eisenhower Matrix: How to Be More Productive
Using Eisenhower’s strategy is actually very simple. Make a list of the activities and projects you have to do, including the unimportant ones that take up your time at work. Then rank the activities based on their importance and urgency
1. Urgent and important (tasks that need to be done immediately).
2. Important but not urgent (tasks that can be scheduled for later).
3. Urgent but not important (tasks that should be delegated to someone else).
4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that should be eliminated).
Eisenhower Matrix - The Effective Time Management Method of the US President - Photo 1.
The great thing about this matrix is that it can be used for both large plans (plans for the whole week) as well as smaller plans (plans for the day).
Here is an example of an Eisenhower Box for a day:
Eisenhower Matrix - The Effective Time Management Method of the US President - Photo 2.
Distinguishing Urgent and Important
"The important things are usually not urgent and the urgent things are usually not important" - Dwight Eisenhower.
Important are the activities that lead us to achieve our goals, whether they are personal or professional activities
Urgent are the activities that we tend to focus on because they require attention to the consequences of not taking immediate action.
It is easy to differentiate between them once, but it can be difficult to do it continuously. The great thing about the Eisenhower Matrix is that it provides a clear framework for making decisions over and over again. And like anything else in life, consistency is key.
Here are some takeaways from using this method:
Eliminate before optimizing
There is no faster way to do something than to do nothing. This is not a reason to be lazy, but a cue to make the hard decisions and eliminate any tasks that do not help you achieve your mission and goals.
Often, we use productivity, time management, and optimization as excuses to avoid the hard questions: "Do I really need to do this?"
It’s a lot easier to stay busy and tell yourself that you just need to be a little more productive or “Stay a little later” than it is to suffer the pain of quitting the work you’re doing, but that’s not the most effective use of your time.
As Tim Ferriss once said, “Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and lazy doing.”
The Eisenhower Method is especially useful because it forces us to question whether an action is really necessary, and gradually moves us to “Drop” the task rather than mindlessly repeating it. Honestly, if we simply eliminated all the things that waste our time each day, we probably wouldn’t need any of this advice.
Does this method help us achieve our goals?
One final note: It’s hard to eliminate tasks that are wasting your time if you’re not sure what you want to do.
Here are two questions that can help clarify the entire process behind the Eisenhower Matrix:
1. What am I working toward?
2. What are the core values that guide my life?
Answering these questions will help us categorize each task in our lives into different categories. Deciding what to do and what to let go of becomes much easier when you have a clear understanding of what’s most important to you.
The Eisenhower Matrix is not a perfect strategy, but it can be a useful decision-making tool that helps increase work efficiency and eliminate activities that waste time and do not help us achieve our goals.