Eisenhower Matrix: a tool to help team to stay focused

Focus is essential for all the teams that want to be successful. We live in a fast-paced world, so it’s easy to get bogged down by distractions and not be able to concentrate energy, effort, and attention on the task at hand.

When a team stays focused, it allows working more efficiently and effectively. It avoids wasting time on low-impact tasks and initiatives.

Focus fosters motivation, and when a team can achieve its objectives, this can lead to a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

There are several ways to improve focus, such as: identifying and prioritizing the most relevant tasks, setting clear goals, removing distractions, etc.

My teams work a lot by?focusing on what matters most. In our journey, we discovered the?Eisenhower Matrix.

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix (EM), also known as the Eisenhower Box (EB) or Eisenhower Decision Matrix (EDM), is a helpful tool for prioritizing tasks and determining which ones to focus on.?

It was developed by the 34th president of the US?Dwight David Eisenhower, who was known for his effective time management and decision-making skills.

He started from the assumption that: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important”, and he proposed a task classification based on four labels:

• Urgent and important
• Important but not urgent
• Urgent but not important
• Neither urgent nor important

Urgent and important

These tasks require immediate attention and are crucial to the team’s success.

Important but not urgent

These tasks are essential for the team’s long-term success but do not require immediate attention.?Prioritizing these tasks is crucial, don’t forget them!

Urgent but not important

These tasks may seem important at the time, but they are not ultimately crucial to the team’s success.

Neither urgent nor important

These tasks are neither urgent nor essential and can generally be avoided or delegated.

This classification leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Importance and urgency can be subjective. Different people may have different opinions on what is important and urgent. This may be more likely when there is a lack of context and information are unclear.

Furthermore, we should remember that: “Simplicity is the art of maximizing the amount of work not done”, as the Agile Manifesto teaches. In other words, the faster way to do something is not doing it at all.

Our Eisenhower Matrix

Our Eisenhower Matrix version is reported in the image below.

As you can observe, it’s a Cartesian plane, where the x-axis represents the urgency, instead the y-axis represents the importance.

Here we can classify a task with three nuances of urgency or importance: low, medium, and high.

We create a post-it for each task, user story, or epic and put it in the right box along with our Product Manager. Sometimes we argue about the perception of importance or urgency. It helps to be all on the same page.

We are all responsible for updating the matrix, and we used to update it during the?planning meeting.

If you are using Miro and want to try our template, it's available on Miroverse here.