Using the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Method

Longtime productivity technique, Eisenhower Method, is often tied to the myth of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After all, it’s named after him! But, there’s much more to the prioritization method than meets the eye. In this episode, the ProductivityCast team explains the Eisenhower Matrix (or more aptly, the Merrill-Covey Matrix) and analyzes the use cases for the time-tested tool.

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In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Using the Eisenhower Matrix

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

https://youtu.be/tT89OZ7TNwc

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Raw Text Transcript | Using the Eisenhower Matrix

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host Ray Sidney-Smith and gousto been out with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, we are going to be talking about what is colloquially known as the Eisenhower method or the Eisenhower matrix. And what I wanted us to do is to cover kind of the origin and the outline of what the Eisenhower matrix is. So we all have a better understanding of it. There's a little bit of mythology around the Eisenhower matrix and the methodology underpinning it, then we're going to talk about our experiences with the Eisenhower matrix and how matrices generally can help us be more productive. And then talking a little bit about when and why you should use it. Where are the contexts in which the Eisenhower matrix can work? And then, of course, how we can blend it with other methodologies, productivity methodologies that we all use in our own productive worlds. So let's start out with what the Eisenhower matrix or what the Eisenhower method is. I'll start with the fact that in 1954, former US President Dwight D, Eisenhower quoting someone else, he was actually quoting Dr. Roscoe Miller, who was the president of Northwestern University. And so he was speaking to the second assembly of the World Council of Churches, it turns out and he was he is quoted as quoting Dr. Miller as saying, quote, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent and quote, this has come to be known as the Eisenhower principle or the Eisenhower matrix. Many people have then mythologized that somehow Eisenhower had developed this whole entire methodology around it. But the reality is, is that his importance and urgency construct was was taken from someone else. And while Eisenhower himself was a great time management afficionado, someone who really paid attention to how he used his time and had many other principles that he abided by, he was not the progenitor of any specific methodology, but it is what we come we have come to known as the Eisenhower matrix, that takes us forward to the concepts behind the Merrill covey matrix. And a lot of people don't know this, but Dr. Stephen Covey had been doing work with Rebecca Merrill and Roger Merrill. And the three of them combined, ended up creating what is now known as the Merrill covey matrix, which is the matrix that most of us know in the view of the four quadrants, and what pieces fit into those four quadrants, and in in the form of importance and urgency, we'll cover that shortly. But just understand that there's been a long arc of progression of people's thoughts around what the Eisenhower matrix is, and ultimately, what became the middle covey matrix and how we actually see that in much of the productivity Literature Today, and a lot of people get this wrong. And so I just wanted to kind of, at least point that piece out in terms of its history, so that we're all understanding the fact that everything between Eisenhower quoting Dr. Miller and any piece of productivity material that has been seen pretty much after the meril covey matrix was published and First things first, and other materials that covey and the Merrill's put out if they are interpretations of the concept of other people,

Art Gelwicks 4:08I mean, it breaks down the old, important, urgent, not important, not urgent analysis of being able to prioritize things. Therefore, something is important and urgent, you should go ahead and do it. It's important and not urgent, you're supposed to schedule it. If you're if it's not important, but it is urgent, you delegate it. And if it's not important, not in urgent, you just kind of put it in the trash can. The methodology is, this is about as close to common sense, as I think we see in the productivity space. These are the logical things, if it's really important that something gets done, you have to prioritize it. If it's really urgent that something gets done, it has to be prioritized. If it's neither one of those things, why you're wasting your time on it. So I get that stuff. I struggle a little bit with one of the categories Which we can talk about a little bit later on. But at the highest level, what I just outlined, that's, that's the question criteria that you apply to tasks and, and anything else, you're really trying to reprioritize to determine where actions are where and when action should take place.

Francis Wade 5:18When the matrix is a, from my point of view is a clever, a clever after the fact analysis of something that's already happened, which is that we create tasks in our mind. There are psychological objects and the moment of creation, we implicitly have a sense of whether something is urgent, not urgent, important or not important, it's might say it's subconscious. But it comes into existence in the moment that we create the task in our minds. So the matrix is, is a, like I said, a clever way to capture a decision that we've already made or a notion that we've already created. It's a way of making external, something that we already internally know. Making it external makes it easier to manage. And I think that's the genius of it, if any,

Augusto Pinaud 6:09as much as the matrix, I believe, had incredible things. And I agree with what Art said, it sounds really, really simple. I think people tend to struggle with the concept of urgent and unimportant and covey did a really good job, trying to discover and identify, you know, what really important means what really urgent being, so it makes more sense in the matrix. But I think still, people struggle with those two concepts and really making them work for them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:47Just some other like small pieces here. So that we have a little bit of clarity in terms of what the Eisenhower matrix really can do, or what the methodology can do. All told. So the matrix is a visual device meant to be able to put particular items in a priority for you to be able to determine whether or not you do that thing. And so if urgency runs across the y axis, and importance runs across the x axis, then what you decide to do make a decision on delegate or delete ends up being those four DS ended up falling into those categories, in in the eyes of most people who talk about the Eisenhower matrix. So then it furthers beyond the visual device to then kind of this full methodology, you can use this for planning your week, you can use this for how to spend your time this, you know, the next three hours today, that kind of thing. And it can also help you plan the things into the future. So you can say, how should I spend my next year? How should I spend my next quarter, whatever it might be. So this tool is just basically a prioritization matrix that allows you to be able to look at almost any type of time horizon and decide things. Now, let's think about it from the perspective that we all now have a basic understanding of the Eisenhower matrix, Eisenhower method, and I'm curious about each of our experiences with utilizing the Eisenhower matrix. And whether or not it has borne fruit for you in and around your productivity system. What has been your experience

Art Gelwicks 8:31with it? The matrix itself is a good basic level tool. I use it to help people understand core concepts around prioritization. But honestly, in its daily use, it's got a lot of flaws. The one flaw that I find in it most frequently is in the categorization of urgent but not important. And most of the time when people look at that particular quadrant,