Printable Eisenhower matrix grid

The matrix is a sorting exercise, not a to-do list. Its value comes from forcing a single decision about each item: important means it moves something you care about forward, urgent means someone will notice if it is late. Those two questions are easier to answer separately than together.

1. Empty your head onto the back of the sheet first. Every task, message and half-idea, in any order, before you start sorting.
2. Take each item and ask whether it is important, then whether it is urgent. Copy it into one quadrant only. An item in two places has not been sorted.
3. Work the "do first" quadrant today. If it holds more than a day of work, the sheet is telling you something, and the fix is to move items down rather than to work faster.
4. Give every item in "schedule" an actual date and time before you leave the sheet. An unscheduled item in that quadrant drifts up into the urgent one later.
5. For "delegate or shrink", write the name of the person next to the item, or write the smaller version of the task you are willing to do instead.
6. Cross out everything in "drop" with a line. Keeping the crossed-out list visible is what stops the same item coming back next week.

A worked example: a Monday sheet has "fix the failing deploy" in do first, "write the hiring plan" in schedule with "Thursday 9:00" beside it, "book the offsite venue" in delegate with a colleague's name, and "reorganise the shared drive" crossed out under drop. Four items, four different decisions, and only one of them belongs to today.

The quadrant most people underfill is "schedule", and it is the one that prevents next month's emergencies. The Get It Done tool runs the same sort on screen, with the capture step and a weekly review.

Keep the filled sheet for the rest of the week and leave it where you can see it. It is a record of decisions rather than a scratch pad, and its main job starts after the sorting stops.

Tick items in the top-left quadrant as they go, and on Friday count the work you actually did that never appeared anywhere on the page. That count is the size of the work arriving after the sort, and it is the number that tells you how much of a week is realistically plannable. Somebody whose sheet covers a fifth of their week should plan a fifth of it.

Then look at what moved. An item that started under schedule and ended up being done in a rush was not an emergency; it was a scheduling failure, and the date beside it says when the failure happened. Those are the items to look at first, because they are the ones the sheet was drawn to prevent.

Compare the new sheet against the last two before you throw the old ones out. An item sitting in schedule for a third week has now been quietly declined three times, and writing it in a fourth quadrant is more honest than writing it in the same one again. The crossed-out quadrant deserves a second read for the same reason: something you dropped a fortnight ago and are still thinking about was probably important after all.

Sorting by how a task feels instead of by the two questions. Dread is not importance, and the item you least want to touch is as likely to be a twenty-minute phone call as a week of work.

Writing a project into a quadrant. Quadrants hold actions, and "the website" cannot be done first, scheduled, delegated or dropped. Sorting a project always produces a stuck sheet, because every quadrant is partly right.

Leaving the drop quadrant empty. A sort with nothing dropped has moved items around without deciding anything, and the page will look identical next week. If genuinely nothing can go, the honest version is to write that on the sheet.

Running the sort on the day you are already behind. Triage done in a panic reproduces the panic: everything lands in the top-left quadrant because everything feels urgent at four o'clock on a bad Thursday. A quiet hour produces a different and better sheet from the same list.

Adding to yesterday's sheet rather than printing a new one. Six lines a quadrant is a budget, and overrunning it turns a triage sheet back into the backlog you were trying to escape.

Print this one single-sided and leave the reverse blank. The capture step happens on the back of the page, and a double-sided print leaves you with nowhere to empty your head and no reason to do the sort properly.

There are twenty-four writing lines on the page, six to a quadrant, and they are deliberately narrow. A task that will not fit on one line of ordinary handwriting is too big to sort, so the ruling is doing part of the thinking for you before you have decided anything.

One sort a week means this is the sheet to print one copy at a time rather than in a batch. Some of the value comes from having to go and fetch a fresh page, which is a small deliberate act that a stack on the desk removes.

A finished matrix is worth more than a finished planner, because it holds decisions rather than intentions. If you keep anything from a paper system, keep these: photograph the sheet before it goes in the recycling, and the record costs you nothing.