How to use this template
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.
- Empty your head onto the back of the sheet first. Every task, message and half-idea, in any order, before you start sorting.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.