How to Prioritize Tasks | The Eisenhower Matrix and Three Other Frameworks

You have ten things to do and three of them will actually get finished today. What you pick decides what the day was worth. The reason prioritizing feels hard every single time is that you are working it out from scratch on the spot, without a standing criterion. This article covers four frameworks you can switch between depending on the situation, and what to do when none of them produces an order.

The Real Reason You Cannot Set Priorities

"It is all important, so I cannot choose" nearly always has the same cause underneath it: you have not decided what to drop.

Prioritizing is not rearranging an order. It is the act of confirming what will not happen today. Naming a number one is easy, but doing so is identical to declaring that the other nine are being deferred. If you will not accept that declaration, no framework will save you, and everything ends up marked high.

Put the other way around: once you can make the deferral call, almost any framework will get you close enough. The four below differ only in which situation they make that call easiest.

Choosing Between the Four Frameworks

• Eisenhower Matrix: clearing the tasks in front of you across a day or a week.
• MoSCoW: the deadline will not move and scope has to come out.
• Impact vs. effort: several possible moves exist and you get to choose whether to make them at all.
• Dependency-first: you are working in a team and your delay stops someone else.

1. The Eisenhower Matrix: Four Boxes from Importance and Urgency

The best-known framework of the four. Tasks are sorted into four quadrants along the axes of importance and urgency.

• Quadrant 1 (important, urgent): do it now. Same-day deliverables, incidents.
• Quadrant 2 (important, not urgent): schedule it. Building systems, learning, relationships.
• Quadrant 3 (not important, urgent): delegate it or reduce it. Most inbound requests and meetings land here.
• Quadrant 4 (not important, not urgent): do not do it.

The value of this framework is not in identifying quadrant 1 but in how you handle quadrant 2. Quadrant 2 has no deadline, so left alone it never gets started. That is why you do not stop at deciding to do it: you finish the thought by putting a block on the calendar. Whether you can schedule this quadrant is what separates two people a year from now.

One caution: urgency is handed to you by other people, while importance is something you have to define yourself. Unless you have already articulated a standard, such as whether the task connects directly to a quarterly goal, everything will look like quadrant 1 in the order it arrived.