What are the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix?

The four quadrants pair urgency with importance. Do holds urgent and important work, such as a client escalation or a deadline today. Decide holds important work with no deadline, like planning or hiring. Delegate holds urgent but unimportant work, mostly interruptions and requests that don't need you specifically. Delete holds whatever is neither, which you stop doing.

How do students use an Eisenhower Matrix?

Students sort coursework by deadline and by weight. An exam tomorrow is Do. Drafting a thesis outline or picking next semester's modules is Decide, since it matters but nothing is due. A classmate's non-urgent question is Delegate, or a reply that can wait. Scrolling between study blocks is Delete. The sort takes about ten minutes at the start of a week.

Is the Eisenhower Matrix the same as a prioritization matrix?

They answer different questions. The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks on two fixed axes, urgent and important, then tells you what to do with each one. A prioritization matrix scores options against several weighted criteria such as effort, reach and revenue, then ranks them. Use Eisenhower for a personal task list, and the project prioritization matrix when you need weighted scoring.

Where does the Eisenhower Matrix come from?

It's named after Dwight Eisenhower, who in a 1954 address to the World Council of Churches in Evanston 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." Stephen Covey later turned that idea into the four-quadrant grid in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

How often should you redo an Eisenhower Matrix?

Weekly works for most people, with small adjustments daily. A week is long enough that the Decide quadrant genuinely changes, and short enough that urgent work hasn't already overtaken the board. If you're rebuilding it every morning, the problem is usually an unfiltered inbox feeding the list rather than the matrix itself.

TemplatesPrioritization & matricesEisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks on two axes, urgent and important, into four quadrants: Do, Decide, Delegate and Delete. This template gives you the labelled grid, a one-line rule under each quadrant, and loose sticky notes you drag into place. Managers, students and anyone staring at an overlong to-do list use it to work out what to act on today and what to drop.

Use this template

The four quadrants, their one-line rules, and blank stickies waiting for your own task list.

What's included

A labelled urgency and importance grid. Important and Not Important run down one axis, Urgent and Not Urgent across the other, so every note lands in exactly one box.
Four named quadrants. Do, Decide, Delegate and Delete sit in the right urgency and importance pairing, already positioned on the grid.
A one-line rule under each quadrant. Do it now, Schedule for later, Ask someone else, Get rid of it, so nobody has to remember which box means what.
Nine blank sticky notes. Loose on the canvas, ready to take one task each before you drag them into a quadrant.

Why use an Eisenhower Matrix?

Pulls urgency and importance apart. Most to-do lists collapse the two. Giving each its own axis shows which urgent work isn't actually moving anything forward.
Forces a decision on every task. A note has to land in a quadrant, so nothing sits unresolved in the middle of a list for another week.
Turns delegation into a named list. Whatever collects in the Delegate quadrant becomes the agenda for your next one to one, instead of a vague intention to hand things off.
Protects the Decide quadrant. Important work with no deadline, planning, documentation, hiring, is what slips first. Seeing it in its own box is what keeps it on the calendar.
Exposes a lopsided workload. If eight of your nine notes land in Do, that's a scope or staffing problem, and the grid makes it hard to keep calling it a personal productivity one.

How to use this template

Open the template. It copies into your workspace with the grid, the quadrant labels and the stickies already in place.
Write one task per sticky note. Empty the whole list out first, one item per note, before you start judging any of them.
Ask whether each task has a real deadline. That answers the urgent axis. Whether it moves a goal forward answers the important one.
Drag each note into its quadrant. Anything you argue about for more than a few seconds usually belongs in Decide rather than Do.
Act on the quadrants in order. Clear the Do pile today, put dates against Decide, name an owner on each Delegate note, then delete the rest.
Share the board with your team. Invite collaborators and use comments to disagree about what counts as urgent before the week starts.

Open the Eisenhower Matrix in Whimsical

Eisenhower Matrix vs Covey's time management matrix

Both grids use urgent and important as their axes, so they look identical on a whiteboard. What differs is what you do with them. The Eisenhower Matrix labels each quadrant with an action, Do, Decide, Delegate or Delete, and runs as a triage pass over today's list. Stephen Covey's version leaves the quadrants unlabelled and treats Quadrant 2 as a target: the more of your week sits in important but not urgent, the better the year goes.

Frequently asked questions

The four quadrants pair urgency with importance. Do holds urgent and important work, such as a client escalation or a deadline today. Decide holds important work with no deadline, like planning or hiring. Delegate holds urgent but unimportant work, mostly interruptions and requests that don't need you specifically. Delete holds whatever is neither, which you stop doing.
Students sort coursework by deadline and by weight. An exam tomorrow is Do. Drafting a thesis outline or picking next semester's modules is Decide, since it matters but nothing is due. A classmate's non-urgent question is Delegate, or a reply that can wait. Scrolling between study blocks is Delete. The sort takes about ten minutes at the start of a week.
They answer different questions. The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks on two fixed axes, urgent and important, then tells you what to do with each one. A prioritization matrix scores options against several weighted criteria such as effort, reach and revenue, then ranks them. Use Eisenhower for a personal task list, and the project prioritization matrix when you need weighted scoring.

It's named after Dwight Eisenhower, who in a 1954 address to the World Council of Churches in Evanston 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." Stephen Covey later turned that idea into the four-quadrant grid in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Weekly works for most people, with small adjustments daily. A week is long enough that the Decide quadrant genuinely changes, and short enough that urgent work hasn't already overtaken the board. If you're rebuilding it every morning, the problem is usually an unfiltered inbox feeding the list rather than the matrix itself.