Eisenhower Matrix: Examples for Managers and Teams

Eisenhower matrix examples show how to sort tasks into four boxes using two questions: is it urgent, and is it important to your goals? Do urgent and important tasks now, schedule important work that is not urgent, delegate urgent tasks that are not important, and drop the rest. Below are worked examples for a founder, a sales manager, a team lead and an employee, plus a template you can copy.

If you only have five minutes, read the definition, then jump to the example closest to your role.

What is the Eisenhower matrix?

The Eisenhower matrix is a simple prioritization grid. One axis asks whether a task is urgent. The other asks whether it is important. Each task lands in one of four boxes, and each box has a default action.

The name comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower. In an address to the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, on 19 August 1954, he quoted an unnamed former college president: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.” The quoted remark goes on to say that the urgent problems are not the important ones, and the important ones are never urgent.

Eisenhower did not publish a four-box grid in that speech. The version most people use today was popularised by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Covey’s main point was that effective people protect time for the box that is important but not urgent: planning, prevention, relationships and building capability.

The Eisenhower matrix: four boxes, four actions

Importance

ImportantNot important

Do nowCrises, real deadlines, customer problems that block revenue.

SchedulePlanning, coaching, hiring, fixing root causes. Book time for it.

DelegateRequests and interruptions that matter to others more than to your goals.

DropBusywork, low-value reports, habits that fill time.

UrgentUrgencyNot urgent

Urgent vs important: how do you tell the difference?

The matrix only works if you sort honestly, and that is harder than it looks. Urgent tasks announce themselves. Important tasks usually wait quietly.

Use these tests:

• Urgent: Will something real go wrong if this waits 48 hours? A missed contractual deadline, a lost customer, a safety issue? If the only consequence is that someone is mildly annoyed, it is probably not urgent.
• Important: Does this move one of your top goals for the quarter, or protect something you cannot afford to lose? If you cannot connect it to a goal, it is probably not important to you, even if it matters to someone else.

There is a reason urgent tasks keep winning. In a 2018 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee found that people chose tasks merely because they were framed as urgent, even when a non-urgent option paid more. They called this the mere urgency effect. A report on the study in Government Executive noted that a timely reminder of the bigger payoff helped people choose better. Sorting your list with the matrix is one way to build in that reminder.

Eisenhower matrix example 1: a founder

Here is a hypothetical example. Imagine the founder of a 15-person design agency on a Monday morning. Her goal this quarter is to win two retainer clients so revenue is less dependent on one-off projects. Her list has eleven items.

A founder's Monday list, sorted

Importance

ImportantNot important

Do nowReply to a retainer prospect's proposal questions due Tuesday. Fix an invoice error for the largest client.

ScheduleWrite the retainer offer page. Coach the new account lead. Plan next quarter's hiring.

DelegateBook trade show travel. Approve stock photos. Answer a supplier's form.

DropRe-sort the shared drive. Attend a webinar with no clear purpose.

UrgentUrgencyNot urgent

The founder does the two urgent and important items first, before 11 a.m. Then she blocks two mornings that week for the retainer offer page and the coaching session. Travel and photo approvals go to the office manager with clear instructions. The two “drop” items leave the list.

Without the matrix, the most likely outcome is a week full of replies and approvals, with the offer page pushed back again. The matrix makes that trade-off visible.

Eisenhower matrix example 2: a sales manager

A hypothetical sales manager leads six account executives. The quarter’s goal is new revenue from mid-sized accounts. Here is how a typical week sorts out.

A sales manager's week, sorted by quadrant

	Tasks	Action
Urgent and important	Join a closing call for the largest deal this month. Resolve a pricing dispute that blocks a signature.	Do it this week, personally
Important, not urgent	Ride along on two calls with the newest rep. Rewrite the discovery questions. Clean up the pipeline stages.	Block time in the calendar now
Urgent, not important	Fill in the event attendance sheet. Answer a request for last year's numbers. Approve small expense claims.	Delegate to a team member or assistant
Neither	A recurring report nobody reads. Re-formatting the team slides.	Stop, and tell people you stopped

The most valuable box here is the second one. Coaching and process improvement rarely feel urgent, yet they decide whether the team hits its number next quarter. If your discovery questions or pipeline stages are part of the issue, the work of defining lead and lag measures belongs in this box too.

More Eisenhower matrix examples: a team lead and an employee

Example 3: a team lead

Imagine a hypothetical customer service team lead with eight agents. The goal is to reduce repeat contacts, where customers have to get in touch more than once about the same issue.

• Do now: An escalated complaint from a key customer. A shift gap tomorrow because two people are sick.
• Schedule: Analyze the top five reasons for repeat contacts. Update the three help articles behind most of them. Hold monthly one-on-ones.
• Delegate: Daily ticket assignment, which a senior agent can own. Collecting holiday requests.
• Drop: Manually copying ticket counts into a slide when the helpdesk already has a dashboard.

The interesting move here is delegating ticket assignment. It feels urgent every morning, but it is not the team lead’s most important work. Handing it to a senior agent frees an hour a day for root-cause work and develops that agent. Our guide on how to delegate tasks effectively shows how to hand it over with clear standards.

Example 4: an individual employee

The matrix is not only for managers. Here is a hypothetical marketing coordinator whose goal is to launch a new email sequence by the end of the month.

• Do now: Fix a broken link in today’s newsletter. Send final copy to the designer, who is waiting.
• Schedule: Write the five-email sequence. Learn the new automation tool. Ask for feedback on the first draft.
• Delegate or push back: A colleague’s request to proofread an unrelated brochure today. A meeting invite where she is not needed.
• Drop: Checking social media metrics several times a day.

For employees, the “delegate” box often means pushing back politely or asking your manager which priority should move. Our guide on how to prioritize work when everything is important includes words you can use.

How do tasks move between boxes, and what goes wrong?

A task does not stay in one box forever. Watching how tasks move is one of the most useful habits the matrix can build.

How tasks move

• Box 2 slides into box 1. The hiring plan you postponed in spring becomes an urgent hiring crisis in autumn when someone resigns. The maintenance you skipped becomes a breakdown. Most recurring emergencies are box 2 tasks that waited too long. When the same kind of crisis appears twice, ask which scheduled task would have prevented it.
• Box 3 grows if you keep doing it yourself. Every urgent but unimportant task you handle personally teaches people to bring the next one to you. Delegating once, with clear standards, shrinks the box over time.
• Goals change the sorting. When your quarterly goal changes, re-sort the whole list. A task that was important last quarter, such as a product feature, may drop to box 4 if the company has shifted focus to retention.
• Box 4 tasks come back in disguise. A report you dropped may return as an urgent request from someone senior. That is a signal to explain why you stopped it, or to agree a lighter version, rather than quietly restarting it.

Common mistakes when using the Eisenhower matrix

The matrix is simple, which makes it easy to use badly. These are the mistakes that come up most often.

1. Putting everything in box 1. If more than a handful of tasks feel urgent and important, apply the 48-hour test again. Many will turn out to be someone else’s urgency.
2. Treating box 2 as a wish list. Writing “coach the new rep” in box 2 is not the same as booking the session. A box 2 task without a calendar slot is likely to stay undone.
3. Delegating without a brief. Handing a task over with no clear outcome, deadline or standard creates rework, which then lands back in box 1.
4. Sorting once and never again. A matrix filled in on Monday and ignored until next Monday helps little. Glance at it each morning before opening email.
5. Ignoring how you feel about a task. Important work that is unclear or uncomfortable, such as a difficult conversation, is easy to postpone. If a box 2 task keeps slipping, break it into a first step you can finish in 30 minutes.

Eisenhower matrix template you can copy

Copy this into a document or a whiteboard. Fill it in once a week, ideally on Monday morning or Friday afternoon.

Box	Rule	My tasks this week	When / who
1. Urgent and important	Do it now, yourself		Today or tomorrow
2. Important, not urgent	Schedule it, protect the time		Block in calendar
3. Urgent, not important	Delegate, or do a quick version		Name the person
4. Neither	Drop it, and tell anyone affected		Remove from list

How to use the template in 15 minutes a week

1. 1Write your goalOne line at the top: the result that matters this quarter.
2. 2List every taskInbox, chat, notebook, head: all of it.
3. 3Sort honestlyUse the 48-hour test and the goal test.
4. 4Act on each boxDo, schedule, delegate or drop.
5. 5Review on FridayHow many hours went to box 2?

A useful rule: try to keep box 1 small. If it is always full, many of those crises probably started life in box 2 as tasks that were postponed until they became emergencies.

How to use the Eisenhower matrix with your team

The matrix becomes more powerful when a team sorts its work together. Here is a simple way to do it.

1. Put the team’s open tasks on a shared board. A whiteboard, a spreadsheet or a project tool with four columns works fine.
2. Sort together once a week. Do it in the blockers section of your weekly team meeting. Ten minutes is usually enough.
3. Argue about importance, not urgency. Disagreement about which box a task belongs in usually means people have different goals in mind. That is worth surfacing.
4. Give every box 1 and box 2 task an owner and a date. Without an owner, scheduled tasks drift back into the urgent box later.
5. Track box 2 progress. Pick one important but not urgent project and show its progress on the team scoreboard.

What are the limits of the Eisenhower matrix?

The matrix is a thinking tool, not a full system. Know its limits.

• It depends on clear goals. If you do not know what matters this quarter, you cannot judge importance. Set the goal first; our OKR examples for managers can help.
• Urgency bias happens before sorting. The Government Executive report on the mere urgency study made this point: the pull of urgency acts at the moment you choose, so a matrix you fill in once a week will not stop every impulse. Re-check the list each morning.
• It ignores effort and dependencies. Two important tasks may differ hugely in time needed, or one may block a colleague. Add a quick effort note or use a second method such as impact vs effort.
• Delegation needs someone to delegate to. In a very small company, box 3 often means doing a faster, simpler version rather than handing it off.

Quick check before you trust your matrix

• My quarterly goal is written at the top
• Box 1 has fewer than five items
• Box 2 tasks have time blocked in my calendar
• Box 3 tasks each have a named person or a simpler version
• Box 4 tasks are off my list, and affected people know

Summary

The Eisenhower matrix sorts every task by two questions, urgent and important, and gives each of the four boxes a default action: do, schedule, delegate or drop. The examples above show the same pattern across roles: most people over-serve the urgent boxes and under-invest in the important but not urgent one, where coaching, planning and root-cause fixes live. Write your goal at the top, sort your list once a week, protect time for box 2 and review on Friday how many hours it actually got.