THERE’S a well-known way to decide what to do, based on what’s urgent and important. It’s called the Eisenhower Box — and I think it’s flawed. Here’s why, and how to turn it into a new, better way to tackle tasks and plan your day, called Hopscotch.
(See the longer version of this article for more useful detail & examples.)
You have far too much on your to-do list, from clearing emails to running for President. Which things should you do, and when, and how?
The Eisenhower Box is a diagram to help you decide:
For any task, consider whether it’s urgent, or important, or not, and the box tells you how to deal with it — like this:
- Important & Urgent (green): things that need action ASAP, such as important meetings/calls/emails, tight deadlines, and crises. Like the box says, you’d better Do them.
- Important & Non-Urgent (blue): big-picture, longer-term things you don’t do enough of, like planning, relationship-building, and training. To ensure you get round to these, Schedule them in your calendar.
- Unimportant & Urgent (orange): unnecessary meetings, phone calls, interruptions, and other needless demands. These grab your attention, but aren’t worth your while — so Delegate them to others instead.
- Unimportant & Non-Urgent (red): total time-wasters, such as pointless emails, web browsing, and anything else that avoids real work. Delete them from your life.
The idea is to focus on what matters, while delegating and deleting less important stuff.
All very plausible — yes?
In fact, as we’ll see, the box is faulty. But we can patch it up to make a new box that’s really useful for deciding what to do.
Urgent / Non-urgent
What makes a task ‘urgent’? The dictionary defines it as ‘requiring immediate action’. That is, it’s important that it’s done immediately. The trouble is, this mixes up two different things — importance and immediacy. This is confusing and unnecessary, as the box already deals with importance in its rows; so let’s focus just on immediacy.
How soon is ‘immediate’? Be specific! Well, when planning your day, it’s useful to distinguish what needs doing today from what can be done later. For example, you must collect the kids from school today, but can book your vacation tomorrow or next week.
Hence, we can improve the box by replacing Urgent/Non-Urgent with Today and Later:
Important / Unimportant
Suppose you have a crucial project to finish today, and also a meeting that’s useful but not essential. You’d better skip the meeting and get on with the project. But the box treats them as equally important.
So it’s better to use degrees of importance, to distinguish between tasks you:
- must do, or risk disaster (like the project);
- should do, as they’re preferable but inessential (like the meeting); and
- could do, but don’t matter much (like a lot of email).
We can achieve this by splitting the Important row into two — Must and Should — and renaming Unimportant as Could:
So now the top left half-cell is for things you Must do Today — like the project — and top right, things you Must do Later, such as pay your rent.
In the new row below the Musts are things you Should do Today — like the meeting — and things you Should do Later, e.g. buy a faster laptop.
Finally, the Could row contains everything else on your to-do list.
Do / Delegate
The box tells you to do Important Urgent tasks yourself, and delegate Unimportant Urgent ones to others. As the saying goes, “if you want a job done properly, do it yourself”.
But should you?
For many important tasks, you shouldn’t do them yourself — you should delegate them, i.e. get someone else to. If you’re on trial for bank robbery, don’t try to conduct your own defence — delegate that to a lawyer.
And many unimportant things aren’t worth delegating. Prince Charles has a valet who squeezes toothpaste onto the royal toothbrush for him; but it’s not worth hiring your own valet for this.
So the box can’t tell us whether to do a task or delegate it (the longer article explains how to decide). Instead, let’s use a phrase that covers both — ‘deal with’:
Schedule
(Sometimes labelled ‘Do later’, ‘Decide’, or ‘Plan’.)
For tasks in the blue cell, which you Must or Should do Later, the box tells you to schedule them for future. But it’s often better to do them today, or at least make a start.
This particularly matters for projects with deadlines. Just a few minutes thinking, researching or planning can reveal how long the project might take, who or what’s needed, and potential problems. This could be crucial, so the sooner you know, the better.
Hence, don’t just schedule blue-cell tasks for future; also consider ‘dealing with’ them:
Delete
(Sometimes called ‘Eliminate’ or ‘Drop’.)
Some things are a complete waste of work time, like pointless social media and web surfing; so you should Delete them. But these don’t belong in the box — they’re not so much tasks you Could do, as things you shouldn’t do. It’s not as if ‘watch cat videos’ is on your to-do list, and you need the box to decide whether to do it; you already know the answer.
Apart from these time-wasters, anything else you Could do might be worth doing someday — so there’s no point deleting them.
For example, your bathroom looks a bit shabby, so you consider repainting it. This is a task you Could do Later, and the box tells you to Delete it. But what’s the point? It can just loiter at the bottom of your to-do list. For if at some point you get decorators in for another job, they could do it then; or if you decide to sell your house, painting the bathroom may become a priority. Why Delete tasks if you might end up doing them anyway?
Instead, make them another thing to Deal With, if you ever get around to it:
Note the phrase ‘get around to it’. Unimportant tasks hang around the bottom of your to-do list, seldom getting done, because you usually have other things to do first.
So what order should you do things in?
Prioritizing
The Eisenhower Box assumes you’ll have enough time to do what it tells you. But in practice there are seldom enough hours in the day.
However, if we do things in order of priority, then at least you’ll deal with what matters most. We can work out the optimal order like this:
- Do Must Todays first, or you might not get through them. And as they must be done today, that would be disastrous.
- Which is higher priority, Should Today or Must Later? E.g. a useful meeting, or crucial planning that can wait? Well, if you do Should Todays first, then you may not get through the Must Laters, and perhaps not even schedule them. Doing this day after day may make you miss deadlines and opportunities, which for a Must is disastrous — whereas Shoulds are optional. So it’s best to deal with Must Laters before Should Todays; and if you’re too busy to work on a Must Later, at least you can schedule it in seconds.
- By the same reasoning, deal with Should Laters before Could Todays — or you may keep postponing important things by filling your days with trivia.
Putting this all together, the best order is:
- Must Today
- Must Later
- Should Today
- Should Later
- Could Today/Later
I’ve lumped Could Today and Could Later tasks together for simplicity, as they’re not important, and you probably won’t get round to them today anyway.
Hopscotch
Let’s redraw our revised box more neatly. We can lose the colours, and replace ‘deal with’ with the above numbers:
For whimsical reasons I’ll call this new box and method Hopscotch. Use it like this:
Plan your day
At the start of each day (or the end of the previous one), go through your full to-do list and appointments, and ask yourself which things you must deal with today, must deal with later, should deal with today, etc. Perhaps label them MT, ML, ST etc. as you go. If you have lots on your plate, just these top three categories should do; but if you include Coulds, only pick the most important ones, as chances are you won’t get round to them today anyway.
Copy these tasks to make a separate to-do list for the day — your day plan. Then put it into the Hopscotch number order: Must Todays first, then Must Laters, then Should Todays, etc.
Within each of these categories, put tasks into descending order of importance. You can then move some around for a few reasons (see the longer article for more), chiefly:
- If a task’s at a fixed time (e.g. a scheduled meeting/call), or must be done after something else (e.g. it’s awaiting approval), move it to when you expect to do it.
- Put related tasks together to increase efficiency, e.g. ones in the same project or location. If you Must go to the dentist, you may as well buy some milk nearby to save a separate trip, even if that’s just a Should.
Using the day plan
Now, down to work. Deal with tasks in the planned order; don’t just pick ones you feel like doing.
Whenever a new task arrives during the day, ask yourself whether you really must deal with it today. If so, do it next, or add it to the Must Todays in your plan; if not, you can probably leave it to consider tomorrow.
You’re unlikely to get through everything by the end of the day. That’s fine — leftover tasks can go on tomorrow’s plan.
Simpler version
Hopscotch is pretty simple. But for something simpler still, we can combine cells 2 & 3, and 4 & 5, to make this minimal method that doesn’t even need a box:
- Start with tasks you must deal with today (unless they have to be done later in the day)
- Then, tasks you should deal with today — the most important first, especially working on or scheduling things you must deal with sometime
- Finally, deal with anything else, in order of importance.
Try it!
When it comes to productivity, there’s one thing better than reading, and that’s doing. So try Hopscotch for a few days, and see how much more you get done. Go on, try it — right now!
Or if you’ve only got a spare minute, try the simpler version — or just the first step: What must you deal with today?
P.S. If you found this article half-interesting, please click the clap/share/follow buttons below, or subscribe to my new blog about optimising work & life. I’ll have plenty more to say on this and similar topics.