At 11am, their boss is expecting a potential customer to come for a meeting. After checking the morning e-mails, they read a newspaper article. Consequently, tasks like these cannot be delegated or put to one side.Īn employee is sitting in their office in New York at 9am. This is because often the tasks that need completing only concern a few people or departments, since important tasks are usually urgent and urgent tasks are rarely unimportant. If no deadline is set, the employee must use their own integrity to decide if it’s urgent or not.Īnother problem can be the uneven distribution of tasks. Urgency, on the other hand, can usually be determined by deadlines. As a result, it can happen that important tasks are delegated to the wrong employees and as a result are not fulfilled sufficiently. For example, it is often difficult to classify the importance of a task correctly. However, the Eisenhower box also has some disadvantages. This, in turn, has the advantage that employees are more involved in the company's work processes. The model is particularly practical for people in management positions, as their time is usually particularly valuable and they can easily delegate less important tasks to their employees. By setting priorities in a clear and unambiguous way, the most important projects can be completed first. The Eisenhower Principle helps you to improve your time management. If there is little time available, these tasks can often simply remain unfinished.

D – neither important nor urgent: These tasks are the last on the list of priorities, as they are not relevant (or are hardly relevant) for achieving the objectives and do not have to be completed particularly urgently.

However, the tasks are of minor importance, which is why Eisenhower recommends delegating these as much as possible.

C – urgent, but not important: These tasks should be completed quite quickly.

However, it is quite possible to postpone these tasks for a while.

B – important, but not urgent: These tasks must also be completed so that you can achieve your own goals.

Otherwise, the goals set cannot be achieved.

A – important and urgent: These tasks have the highest priority and must be completed immediately.Here’s an overview of the four quadrants: Less important tasks, on the other hand, are delegated to others or sometimes even discarded. If you make use of the Eisenhower box, you first perform the tasks that are important and urgent, and then devote yourself to those projects that are also important, but are less urgent. Using this simple matrix, which consists of four quadrants in total, ensures greater productivity in the long term.

Eisenhower matrix