Priorities

Eisenhower matrix

Sort your open tasks by importance and urgency, then act on the sort: do the top-left, put a date on the top-right, shrink the bottom-left, drop the rest. Tasks are shared with the task manager and stay in this browser.

Task manager

Do first

urgent and important

Schedule

important, not urgent

Delegate

urgent, not important

Drop

neither

Unsorted

0 open tasks waiting

Everything open is sorted. Add a task above, or capture more in the task manager.

Urgent and important - Do first

Do first, today

Nothing here yet.

Important, not urgent - Schedule

Give it a date before it turns urgent

Nothing here yet.

Urgent, not important - Delegate

Hand off, or shrink it to the smallest honest version

Nothing here yet.

Neither - Drop

Say no now instead of carrying it for months

Nothing here yet.

A sort only pays off if it changes what you open next. Move the Do first items into today's plan, then run them on the timer.

Daily planner Pomodoro

How to sort honestly

Two questions, asked in this order. Does this move something I actually care about forward? That is importance. Does it have a real deadline, one with a consequence attached? That is urgency. Most people answer the second question first, which is exactly the trap: a ringing phone and a loud inbox feel like deadlines without being attached to anything you value.

Be straight about the evidence. The matrix itself is folklore as a treatment. The Eisenhower attribution is apocryphal, and no controlled trial shows that drawing four boxes makes people more productive. What the boxes target is real and measured. In a set of experiments on the mere urgency effect, Zhu, Yang and Hsee (2018) had people choose between tasks where the urgent option paid less than the non-urgent one, and people still took the urgent option even when they could see it was worth less. The bias shrank when participants were prompted to weigh the payoff explicitly. So the useful part of the matrix is not the drawing. It is the forced pause where you name what a task is worth before you let its deadline decide for you.

The load-bearing quadrant is Schedule. Do first empties itself because deadlines push it along, and Drop is easy once you admit the item was never going to happen. Important work with no deadline is the part that quietly waits until it becomes an emergency, so it only survives if it leaves this page with a date on it. That is why the Schedule rows have a date field: pick a day, and the task moves into the scheduled list where the rest of the site can see it.

Keep the Do first quadrant small. If eight things are urgent and important, you have not sorted, you have relabelled the pile. Three is a working number, which is also the shape of the daily planner.

Frequently asked questions

What makes something important?

It moves a goal or a commitment you would defend out loud. A useful test: if this were the only thing you finished this week, would the week count as a win, and would anyone besides you notice the difference in a month? Importance comes from the outcome, not from who is asking or how loudly.

What if everything feels urgent?

Then urgency is not doing any sorting work, so sort by importance first and add deadlines back after. For each item, write down the actual consequence of it slipping by a week. Most items have none, and they leave the urgent column on their own. The ones with a real consequence are your Do first list, and there are usually fewer than you feared.

How often should I re-sort?

Once a week is enough for the whole board, plus a quick pass on the unsorted tray whenever you have captured a batch of new tasks. Re-sorting daily turns into its own procrastination: you get the pleasant feeling of organising without doing any of the sorted work.

Does the matrix itself have evidence behind it?

Not as a productivity intervention. There are no trials showing that people who use the four boxes get more done than people who do not, and the Eisenhower story attached to it is apocryphal. The underlying finding is solid: people reliably pick worse tasks just because they feel urgent, and that bias weakens when the value of each option is made explicit. Treat the matrix as one cheap way to force that explicit step, not as a proven method, and drop it if a plain list does the same job for you.