The importance versus urgency matrix below is attributed to President Eisenhower, but it was popularised by Stephen Covey, the management guru. The matrix helps you to choose which tasks or actions to focus on by understanding how important and how urgent each task is. It will help you to invest more time in dealing with important activities and guide you away from urgent activities.

• Important and urgent: just do it
• Important but not urgent: schedule it
• Not important but urgent: push back
• Not important and not urgent: ignore.

The importance versus urgency matrix