Prioritizing for Maniacs Tool #3
Eisenhower Matrix
This tool works by having you decide whether it is urgent or not, important or not. When you realize that a task is not important and not urgent, it makes it easier to see that you should not be stressing over getting it done, even if having it on your to-do list is bugging you. Conversely, this tool has helped me when I realize that I have a task that is both important and urgent, such as filing my taxes before they are due in the very near future, but have been avoiding so long that it has become invisible to me.
An important caveat is one must determine the difference between someone else's "urgent important" and your own, because if you're at all prone to people pleasing, you can end up focusing on someone else's priorities while neglecting your own. For example, this past fall I had three major requests made of me from three different organizations in which I am involved; rather than thinking "they really need me or they wouldn't ask," I looked at my own schedule, workload, and goals, and realized that it would be impossible for me to say yes without sacrificing my top priorities. I really did not have the bandwidth, and these requests were way beyond my actual obligations, so, I said no.
I do find that as the primary parent and educator for my children, I have a lot of tasks that feel like they aren't important, they aren't urgent, which is why they have sat undone for so long, but I also can't delete them. For example, I currently have a stack of papers, binders, mail, books, and scraps of paper. It will take me about 45 minutes to go through it and even decide what can be tossed, what needs my attention, and when it needs my attention. There are numerous tasks on my list that are probably more important than most of what I will find in this stack, and yet, I still have to take care of this because the clutter is bad news and there may be important/urgent to-dos inside of it. It is my own Schrödinger's cat. Because this issue of mysterious doom piles is so commonplace, I use the next tool, scheduled maintenance, to handle them while not losing sight of bigger picture tasks.
So, I ask you to gift yourself a few minutes and a piece of paper to make this matrix and start filing your most pressing "to do's" in it. Did you find yourself recategorizing anything once you gave yourself permission to consider if a task was important or urgent, neither or both?
Read the whole series:
- Know your specs (January 15, 2026)
- Slay the perfectionism dragon (January 22, 2026)
- Eisenhower matrix (January 29, 2026)
- Scheduling maintenance (February 5, 2026)
- The Ignatian Method (February 12, 2026)
- Believe that you too only have 24 hours in a day (February 19, 2026)
- Big Picture Questions (February 26, 2026)