Cobra Effect · Decisions and strategy
The Eisenhower matrix
Urgent things crowd out important ones unless you protect them.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:25, with a test and sources.
1954. A president tells a church assembly about his two kinds of problem.
Dwight Eisenhower is speaking in Evanston, Illinois, to the World Council of Churches. He quotes 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. The line is remembered as his. He was careful to say it wasn’t.
Urgent means it shouts. Important means it matters.
The ringing telephone is urgent. The exercise you keep meaning to start is important. They feel like the same kind of pressure. They are not. Urgent is about time. Important is about consequence.
Draw two lines and you get four boxes. That is the Eisenhower matrix.
Urgent and important: do it now. The burst pipe. Important, not urgent: schedule it. The pension, the doctor, the friend you haven’t called. Urgent, not important: hand it off. Most of the post. Neither: drop it. You know what these are.
One box gets all the neglect. The second.
Nothing in it will ever shout. So it waits, until it stops being important and becomes urgent. The check-up skipped becomes the operation. The maintenance not done becomes the breakdown, at three in the morning, on a Sunday.
Stephen Covey put the grid in a bestseller. Then everyone forgot the point.
His 1989 book called the second box the heart of effective personal management. The grid is not for sorting your to-do list faster. It is for noticing that your day is spent in boxes one and three, and your life is decided in box two.
Tonight, put one thing from box two on tomorrow’s calendar.
Not the list. The calendar, with a time. Urgent things will find their own slot. They always do. The important ones only happen if you give them one. Which box did today go in?
Sources
- Time management, Wikipedia. The section on the Eisenhower method has the 1954 speech, the quote and its attribution to an unnamed college president, and how the grid spread from there.
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, 1989. Habit three, Put First Things First, is the grid with the second box at its centre. The rest of the book is optional.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Wikipedia. The soldier who planned the Normandy landings and then ran a presidency. Worth reading to see why a line about the urgent and the important stuck to him.
Nearby ideas
- Parkinson’s law. Work expands to fill the time you give it.
- Satisficing. Good enough, chosen quickly, often beats the endless hunt for best.
- Two-way doors. Decide reversible things fast, and save care for what you cannot undo.
- Hofstadter’s law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you allow for that.
- Ulysses contracts. Bind your future self before the temptation arrives.
- Zero sum thinking. Most deals are not fixed pies, and treating them as one wastes value.
- Tit for tat. Cooperate first, answer a betrayal once, then forgive.
- BATNA. Your power in a negotiation is what you will do if you walk away.