Focus Matrix to-do app helps prioritize ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ tasks

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a five-star general during World War II and the thirty-fourth POTUS. Not too surprisingly given his accomplishments, he knew how to get stuff done. On the man’s long list of claims to fame is “organizational guru” … sort of.

With just a cursory search, I found about a dozen apps built around what came to be known as the “Eisenhower Matrix,” the “Eisenhower Decision Matrix,” or more simply, the “Eisenhower box.”

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The idea behind the former president’s matrix is to prioritize your action items to be more efficient and focused, and then assign them to one of four categories: “Important/Urgent,” “Important/Not Urgent,” “Not Important/Urgent,” and “Not Important/Not Urgent.”

If this strategy intrigues you, you should download the new iOS and Mac app, Focus Matrix. The freemium software makes it easy to add to-do items to one of the four quadrants; view to-dos at a glance in quadrant- or list-view; add due dates and tags; review reports of completed tasks; and more.

To sync to-dos across multiple devices, you need to upgrade to the Pro version, which costs $2 on iOS and $3 on Mac. If you prefer a visual approach to prioritizing to-dos and want the sync capabilities, the upgrade is worth the money.

If you just want to quickly capture to-do items, however, Focus Matrix and apps like it probably aren’t for you. The Eisenhower box requires you to think about your to-do items more than you might want to — which isn’t actually a bad thing. But how do you determine if action items are unimportant but also urgent? Aren’t urgent to-dos by default important? And if something is neither important nor urgent, does it really need to be entered into a to-do app at all?

Eisenhower didn’t really provide guidance on how to use the decision-making matrix that was eventually attributed to him. During a 1954 speech, he quoted someone else as saying that there are essentially two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. “The urgent are not important,” Eisenhower said. “And the important are never urgent.” 

OK. Well. That clears everything up ….

If you want to dig a little deeper, check out the Quote Investigator’s post on the origins of Eisenhower’s quote, and its afterlife. It’s an important read for folks who value organization, though it’s hardly urgent.