Sort your tasks by urgency and importance in seconds. Dump everything into the inbox, press 1-4 to place each task, and see at a glance what to do, schedule, delegate, and drop.
Urgent = needs attention in the next day or two. Important = moves a goal forward. Press 1-4 or drag any inbox task onto a quadrant.
Urgent & important - Deadlines, crises, real problems. Do these today.
Important, not urgent - Planning, growth, prevention. Give each one a date.
Urgent, not important - Interruptions and other people's asks. Hand them off.
Not urgent, not important - Busywork and time-wasters. Drop them.
Most of your important work is not urgent yet - exactly where you want to be. Protect calendar time for it.
3 scheduled tasks have no date. Scheduled means a date on the calendar.
Eliminate holds 2 tasks. Delete them - writing it down was the hard part.
The Eisenhower Matrix - also called the urgent-important matrix or the Eisenhower box - is a simple way to decide what to work on. Every task gets two yes-or-no questions: is it urgent, and is it important? The answers drop it into one of four quadrants, and each quadrant comes with a default action.
The method is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said he had two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, and that the urgent are rarely important. Stephen Covey turned that idea into the four-quadrant time management matrix in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and it has been a staple of personal productivity and team planning ever since.
Start with a brain dump. Type every task you can think of into the inbox, or paste a whole list from your notes - each line becomes its own task. Then sort them one at a time: the triage card shows the next task, and you press 1, 2, 3, or 4 (or click a quadrant) to place it. Deciding one task at a time is faster than staring at a grid, and it keeps you honest about what is truly urgent.
Once everything is sorted, finish the job the matrix asks for. Add a date to every Schedule task and an owner to every Delegate task - the matrix health check flags the ones you missed, and warns you if too much of your work lives in Do First. Check tasks off as you go, drag them between quadrants when priorities shift, and empty Eliminate without guilt.
Your matrix is saved in your browser. When you want to share it, copy it as text or Markdown, download a PNG for a slide or a chat, or copy a share link that opens the exact same matrix for a teammate.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a great weekly ritual, but a static grid does not remind anyone of a due date or tell a teammate a task is now theirs. That is the job of a project board. The CSV export is built for that handoff: each task comes with a priority (Do First is high, Schedule is medium, Delegate is low), its due date, and its assignee. Import it into a t0ggles project with Import Tasks, map the columns once, and filter by priority and due date to get the same Do First view back - with reminders, assignees, and real-time updates for the whole team.
Prefer pen and paper or your own notes app? Copy one of these templates.
Paste into a doc, a notes app, or a team chat and fill it in.
EISENHOWER MATRIX - [Week of ...] 1. DO FIRST (urgent + important) - - 2. SCHEDULE (important, not urgent) - add a date to each - [task] - [date] - [task] - [date] 3. DELEGATE (urgent, not important) - add an owner to each - [task] -> [person] - [task] -> [person] 4. ELIMINATE (not urgent, not important) - -
Works in Notion, Obsidian, GitHub, and any Markdown editor.
# Eisenhower Matrix ## 1. Do First - urgent & important - [ ] - [ ] ## 2. Schedule - important, not urgent - [ ] Task (date) - [ ] Task (date) ## 3. Delegate - urgent, not important - [ ] Task -> owner - [ ] Task -> owner ## 4. Eliminate - not urgent, not important - [ ]
Run every task through these questions before it goes into a quadrant.
For each task, ask: 1. Is it URGENT? Does it need attention in the next day or two, with a real consequence if it slips? 2. Is it IMPORTANT? Does it move a goal, a commitment, or a relationship you care about forward? Yes + Yes -> Do First No + Yes -> Schedule (put a date on it) Yes + No -> Delegate (put a name on it) No + No -> Eliminate (delete it)
A matrix tells you what matters this week. A board makes sure it gets done - with priorities, due dates, owners, and reminders your whole team sees. Try t0ggles free - no card required.