---
title: "Eisenhower Matrix: Urgent vs Important | Bright Peaklet"
description: "Sort tasks into do now, schedule, delegate and drop. Drag them between quadrants or use the Move menu, tick them off and print. Saved in your browser."
url: https://brightpeaklet.top/eisenhower-matrix/
---

# Eisenhower matrix: sort what's urgent from what's important

Add your tasks, then place each one by two questions: does it matter, and does it have to happen now? Drag cards between quadrants, or use each card's Move menu.

## Urgent is not the same as important

The grid sorts tasks by two separate questions. **Important**: does it move you towards something you care about? **Urgent**: does it have to happen now? It takes its name from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in a 1954 speech quoted a former college president: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

- **Do now**: urgent and important, such as a deadline today or a real emergency.
- **Schedule**: important but not urgent, such as planning, health, learning and relationships. Give each a date, or it never happens.
- **Delegate**: urgent but not important to your goals, like many requests and interruptions. Hand them on, batch them or keep them short.
- **Drop**: neither. Delete it or let it go.

Stephen Covey popularised the four quadrants in *The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People* (1989), arguing that the Schedule quadrant is where lasting progress is made.

## Sources

- Eisenhower DD. Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois, 19 August 1954; Covey SR. *The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People* (Free Press, 1989).
- [Time management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management), on the Eisenhower method and its origins.

## Questions

**What if I have nobody to delegate to?**

Read the quadrant as "minimise": batch these tasks, automate them, give them one short slot a day, or say no.

**Almost everything lands in Do now. Is that normal?**

It is common, and a sign to look again. Ask of each task what happens if it waits a day; many turn out to belong in Schedule.

**Can I use it without a mouse?**

Yes. Every card has a Move menu, up and down buttons and a delete button, so you can sort the whole board with the keyboard or on a phone.