## Manage priorities rather than time It is often more appropriate to talk about managing priorities than time. The Eisenhower method can be very useful to determine priorities. It begs the question which tasks, activities, and projects are urgent and important. Activities that are neither important nor urgent therefore do not require attention now, but the whole system needs to be reviewed regularly to ensure that these priorities are still current. The decision-maker will still need to evaluate rationally which items should go into which quadrant and encourages them to think carefully when assigning importance and urgency. The analysis is necessary, but actions are essential to make things happen and making good decisions requires good information. There must come a time when plans are put into practice, even if not yet perfect. To combat this risk, establish contingency actions which you can take if the plan does not work out. A principal characteristic of management is decision-making. Deciding is vital to taking action in everyday management just as in project management. ## Eisenhower decision-making The Eisenhower method of decision making is an easy way to think about your priorities and tasks on a simple grid of urgency against importance. ![[eisenhower matrix grid.png]] So if you’re thinking about your activities, choose the things that are both important and urgent. Some things are neither important nor urgent, which, relative to the others, you shouldn’t be doing at all. This type of planning is a way of thinking about your activities, your desired outcomes, and what you should be doing now and in the future. ![[eisenhower matrix from app.jpg]] The Eisenhower matrix is a very simple representation of choices, about what’s important and what is urgent. See below for implementations with Notion, Kanbanote, Trello, Excel, Todoist and Access. ![[eisenhower-decision-matrix.png]] ## Workload, stress and decision-making Some people suffer from workload-related stress. Using management solutions to prioritize helps with a manager's main responsibilities. The objective is to reduce stress by reducing risk. Cartesian methods such as the Eisenhower method, reduces the stress factor of decisions because choices are weighed analytically. The Eisenhower method is useful for determining daily priorities working on the principle of importance and urgency. All tasks are measured against the criteria urgency and importance and scored: Task 1: importance 1, urgency 2, Task 2: importance 2, urgency 2 etc. It is important to have just two possible values for each axis: urgency and importance to decide the score of each task relative to others. The constraint 'forces' you to make a decision. At any point in time, the tasks to be done are those that are both important and urgent. All others are by definition neither sufficiently urgent nor sufficiently important. This does not mean these secondary tasks are unimportant, just that they are relatively less important than others. As tasks are completed, all others are reevaluated to determine how their relevant importance or urgency might have changed and new scores given. Urgency should not be confused with last minute, since urgency is only a relative term. An urgent might be one that needs to be done within a week whereas a non-urgent task might need to be done within a month. Importance is not the same thing as urgency. Something could be urgent (post a letter in time for collection) but not important (it’s just a return to sender). But filling in your tax return on the last day before the deadline should be important and most certainly urgent because the deadline is close. It may be extremely important for you to make money or achieve your business objectives, but not necessarily urgent (depending on circumstances). You may achieve your objective over the course of your one to three-year plan. However, it is probably most urgent and important to invoice on the last day of the month. The principle here is to use the horizontal (X) access for urgent and not urgent and the vertical (Y) access to represent importance. We tend to do things at the top of the list first, so place important things at the top of the list. It’s a natural reflex to move the urgent column to the left. The important stuff is at the top, and so the important, urgent tasks (the first ones to do = next action) are those at the top left. And those are the ones that you are most likely to see, and therefore action. Keep it as simple as possible – the brain will find all manner of techniques to avoid ‘doing’ nonetheless not being able to find the task card! This helps with the review process. When you are looking for things to do, you can just simply look at the top left of the screen. If you made the investment in organizing your stuff, you will quickly find what you need to do next. Everything is relative, of course. The things that you classify as important and urgent may not be so to anyone else. It’s what you consider to be important and urgent. ## Implementing the Eisenhower Matrix The Eisenhower matrix can ultimately be arranged as four squares of a quadrant or in four columns. ### Eisenhower matrix in Obsidian #Obsidian This is a video showing you how to set up an Eisenhower Matrix in Obsidian.  Create **four notes**, each representing a quadrant. Tag each note "Action" and add properties: For instance, to a note called "Build a Rocket" - **Importance** (values: important, not important). - **Urgency** (values: urgent, not urgent). - **Next Action** ("Buy metal"). - **Goal** ("Fly to the Moon"). **Display in a Dataview grid**: - Select notes tagged "action". - Sort by **importance** and **urgency**. ![[Mindmap of obsidian action notes.png]] The grid updates automatically when note details change. Display different fields, such as **goal** or **next action**, depending on the focus. This method allows dynamic tracking and visualization of tasks as an Eisenhower Matrix in Obsidian. ### Eisenhower matrix in Tick Tick There are some nice apps on Android to manage tasks with the Eisenhower method. Tick tick is very good.  In TickTick, you can easily add an item to any quadrant, and then you can easily move the item between quadrants. So effectively moving the item from urgent and important to not urgent and important or any other quadrant. ![[TickTick Eisenhower mind map.png]] In TickTick, you can easily add an item to any quadrant, and then you can easily move the item to any other quadrant. You can easily add a date to an item, and then the item will come up in the seven day list. The description field is very useful to clarify a task item. You can create a task which is composed of list items, and once all the items in the list are complete, the parent task is complete. You can nest items one within another and create a subtask from within a task. ![[eisenhower-in-ticktick.png]] Ticktick is GTD compatible because it works with lists and also has an inbox. Items stay in the inbox until moved to another list. ### Eisenhower matrix in Notion The Eisenhower notation can be implemented in Notion, by adding a select property with these values: - Important and Urgent - Urgent but Not Important - Important but Not Urgent - Not Urgent and Not Important ![[eisenhower-with-notion.webp]] ### Eisenhower matrix in Trello So long as the concepts of urgent and important are clear, a Trello kanban can be a very useful and easy tool to implement this system. Here you can see important and urgent tasks displayed on an Eisenhower matrix with Trello quite easily. ![[eisenhower-in-trello.png]] This grid is a simple concept that General Eisenhower put forward in the Second World War, but it still holds true today. The thing to determine is what I should be doing next (this is the basis of [David Allen’s GTD](https://gettingthingsdone.com/)). The answer that Eisenhower provides is that the next thing to do is the item which is most important and most urgent. This does not mean that you should be waiting until everything is urgent, on the contrary proactivity means doing things as soon as possible. Trello, therefore, helps you implement #GTD and Eisenhower. It gives you a quick and easy way to sort your important urgent tasks from the non-important non-urgent tasks. These tasks will get done later unless you move the tiles up on the Trello Kanban grid. The video below explains a simple implementation of the Eisenhower method for prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and importance. In Trello, organize tasks into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. Trello's flexibility allows you to reorder tasks flexibly based on changing priorities. For example, customer orders are typically urgent and important, while selling household items is neither. Tasks in the "neither urgent nor important" category should ideally be avoided. It is important to consciously decide what qualifies as urgent and important. This method helps streamline decision-making and maintain focus on priorities. --- Answer from Perplexity: pplx.ai/share  ### Eisenhower matrix in Excel The Eisenhower method is embodied in a quadrant, which could just as easily be arranged in Excel. This arrangement, however, does not allow you to have individual cards for each task item, unlike Notion, Trello and Todoist. ![[eisenhower-in-excel.png.webp]] Eisenhower in Excel ### Eisenhower matrix in Todoist Ultimately, you could arrange the Eisenhower matrix in four sections in Todoist, and display the project, as below, in kanban mode. ![[eisenhower-in-todoist.webp]] But the tendency is to use the priority field in Todoist. ![[todoist-item-card.png]] Above: an item card in Todoist on which you can set a priority. ### Eisenhower matrix in Access Here is a working model of the Eisenhower matrix in Microsoft Access. ![[mjl-tek/posts/Attachments/eisenhower-in-access.png]] Double-clicking on a task item in any quadrant opens a detail screen to manage the action. ![[action card in Microsoft Access.png]] This functionality is included in the [[Manage Translation Projects in Microsoft Access]]. ## Eisenhower matrix in Kanbanote Kanbanote is connected to Evernote and effectively allows you to order and reorder Evernotes in a visual spatial organization. ![[eisenhower-setup-in-kanbanote.png]] ### Kanbanote grid ![[eisenhower with kanbanote.PNG]] **Kanbanote uses multiple tags**. Following the recent release of multi-tags in Kanbanote, you can now do this quite easily. ![[kanbanote-release-multitags.png]] ### Configure kanbanote The following shows how to configure your Evernote tasks into the Eisenhower grid on Kanbanote. ![[eisenhower with kanbanote.PNG]] ### Use the right tags in Evernote First, establish some tags such as the following shortened forms so that you can quickly enter the tags in Evernote. - imp: important - nimp: not important - urg: urgent - nurg: not urgent ![[eisenhower-tags.png]] This enables you simply to tag items with their importance and urgency, and they will be displayed as follows in [Kanbanote](https://www.kanbanote.com/) as long as you set up the columns correctly. You end up with four columns representing each of the four quadrants in the Eisenhower matrix: ![[eisenhower-setup-in-kanbanote.png]] - important and urgent - important and not urgent - urgent and not important - not urgent and not important This is how to use kanbanote to implement the Eisenhower method. ### Move notes between columns The beauty of Kanbanote is that you can easily slide notes from one column to the other. So if you decide that an item is important and urgent, just slide it over to the **important and urgent column** and Kanbanote will automatically reassign tags in Evernote. The note itself will then be retagged important and urgent. ### Kanbanote or Trello In many ways, this brings Kanbanote closer to being a competitor of Trello, which also presents to-dos as a kanban. Evernote allows you to add reminders to notes and get notifications on the due date. However, Trello is faster and there are a lot of plugins, such as Gantt charts and planners.