How To Time Blocking Your Day With Eisenhower Matrix

With that you can visualize what is necessary to work with during your day

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

As we know, the Eisenhower Matrix (or diagram), is also known as the Eisenhower decision matrix, an incredible tool that can help you to prioritise your tasks based on criteria such as urgency and importance. As soon as you define and sort out the tasks that need more attention, you’ll find it easier to do or even to delegate the tasks.

Decision principles

• Urgent and Important tasks: Here you have to manage the tasks, they are usually tasks involving some kind of Crisis or Re-Working, not to mention that could also involve short deadlines or even delayed ones.
• Not urgent, but important tasks: These you can use for productivity, which will involve planning, prevention, preparation, and personal development
• Urgent, but not important tasks: Oh boy, the boring ones, and the ones that could impact big time if not avoided, such things like interruptions, e-mails, phone calls
• Not urgent and not important tasks: Here is the procrastination area, avoid anyway, like video games, entertainment, escaping the important activities as well. Or even better, remove these tasks from this list.

You can see here a graphical example of how to organize:

Find the period of your day your most productive

Everyone has a different pace, especially in different periods of the day, so each one of us needs to identify periods of the day we are most productive. For example, I’m highly productive in the morning. After lunch my productivity drops to at least 50%, it takes some time until I get the same traction as in the morning.

So I will focus on my mornings to resolve the tasks that are urgent and important. Then after lunch is not important but urgent tasks for one or two hours. For the tasks that can be even eliminated, I added 30 minutes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to have a look but not with big intentions to do it.

The Eisenhower Calendar

Having in mind the day you are highly productive and the period of the day you are less productive, it’s important to create the Time Blocks accordingly. Which you will have the focus for the tasks in that period of the day.

As you can see, I created one calendar for each block of the matrix, then it will be easy to visualize the periods of the day I will focus on specific tasks during work. But it’s good to keep in mind that each one of us has our own pace and our own ways of work. For me, this structure works fine, especially when I have to consider the many meetings I have to take part every day.

For people who are in maker’s time might be easier to follow strictly, but for people in manager’s time might be completely different. Each position provides a different way of work, then it’s important to adapt the blocks concerning how are the company’s culture and the time you are in (maker or manager).