Prioritize Wisely: Ace Your Assignments with the Eisenhower Matrix (Time Management Matrix)

College years can feel overwhelming. Students must find the time and energy to juggle their education, work, and private time. We know it can feel challenging to keep up with your schedule when all your deadlines are burning. That’s why we recommend that you separate urgent issues from long-term goals. Otherwise, you won’t be productive, and, more importantly, you’ll have difficulty reaching your larger life goals.

The Eisenhower Matrix will help you delegate the things that don’t contribute to your success so that you can concentrate on your essential tasks.

In this article, you’ll find the answers to the following questions:

• How can prioritizing particular tasks help you reach an agreeable study-life balance?
• What is the Eisenhower Matrix, and how can it improve your time-management skills?

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🔦 The Eisenhower Matrix Explained

The Eisenhower Matrix is a helpful technique for prioritizing your tasks. It is also known as the Eisenhower Box, the Eisenhower Method, the Urgent-Important Matrix, and the Time Management Matrix. Let’s look deeper into this approach and how to employ it to manage your time and tasks efficiently.

What Is the Eisenhower Matrix?

The Eisenhower Matrix is a popular time-management framework designed to help people sort their tasks according to their urgency and importance.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of the United States during World War II, once said that he had two kinds of problems: urgent and important. He thought that an important issue could never be urgent and vice versa..

Many years later, American businessman and author Stephen Covey transformed the president’s idea. He introduced one of the most admired task management tools, the Eisenhower Matrix, in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. For this framework, he used the same two characteristics – urgency and importance – but argued that they aren’t mutually exclusive. Covey’s matrix includes four boxes:

1. important and urgent;
2. important and non-urgent;
3. non-important and urgent;
4. non-important and non-urgent tasks.

In this article, we’ll refer to these boxes as quadrants. For a more thorough explanation, keep reading.

When to Use the Eisenhower Matrix?

The Time Management Matrix is a #1 helper when:

1. You have long-term goals but lack the time or energy to work on them.
2. You feel like your friends and groupmates are more productive than you.
3. You procrastinate a lot.
4. You miss your deadlines.
5. You want to start a side job but cannot find any free time.
6. You study excessively and miss seeing your friends and family regularly.
7. You find it challenging to say “no” to other people.
8. You fear missing out on events and college life experiences.
9. You quickly get distracted by the things surrounding you.
10. You want to become the best version of yourself.

Benefits and Limitations of the Eisenhower Matrix

Students often struggle with poor time management, all-nighters, and emotional burnout. However, the Eisenhower Matrix allows you to change your approach to organizing your studies and life.

Consider the benefits of this tool:

Now, check this framework’s deficiencies to set realistic expectations about it:

⚖️ Important Vs. Urgent Tasks

The purpose of the Eisenhower Matrix is to evaluate tasks according to their importance and urgency. Remember that these two characteristics are highly individual for each case.

Important tasks have these features:

• They contribute to your long-term missions.
• They can be broken down into several sub-tasks.
• They are time-consuming and effort-intensive.
• They determine the direction of a person’s life.
• They may or may not have a set deadline.
• They often require organizational planning instead of immediate action.

An example of such a task for every student is writing their final thesis. An efficient strategy for finishing your research is to divide it into sections and work on them individually throughout the year.

The features of urgent tasks are different:

• They demand immediate attention and action.
• They have a visible deadline that is close to the current date.
• They are often driven by external factors.
• They require a focused, narrow mindset.

Examples of urgent tasks include answering an emergency email from your professor, preparing for the next day’s test, or any other situation demanding a prompt response.

⚠️ Note that since important tasks take longer to accomplish, people often neglect them. And if you’ve been putting them off for too long, they’ll demand immediate attention one day. For instance, some students start their thesis a few days before the deadline, making it both an urgent and critical assignment.

Don’t make this mistake – distribute your tasks in all four quadrants!

🔢 The Four Quadrants of the Matrix

The key advantage of the Eisenhower Matrix is its simplicity. You only have four boxes to fill. They are also called quadrants and differ based on their level of importance and urgency. The idea of the matrix is to put your tasks into one of these quadrants:

Important & Urgent Quadrant #1

Important and urgent tasks are inevitable and demand that you act quickly. Typically, they occur when you have a deadline looming, experience an emergency, or face the consequences of procrastinating for too long. Some issues from this quadrant can be foreseen, but others are impossible to predict and require you to act ASAP.

Important & Non-Urgent Quadrant #2

Important but non-urgent tasks are the steps needed to achieve your long-term goals. Sometimes, they don’t have a deadline, so you can put them off in favor of more urgent tasks. However, these actions bring you opportunities to strengthen your skills. If you gradually take on meaningful and non-urgent tasks, you decrease the number of problems that may arise in the first quadrant.

Non-Important & Urgent Quadrant #3

Non-important tasks are inherent in every student’s routine. These activities are based on expectations set by others, like professors or parents. Since they’re related to other people’s priorities, you might prefer to do something else. If possible, try to delegate these tasks so they don’t take over your day.

Non-Important & Non-Urgent Quadrant #4

You can eliminate non-urgent and non-important tasks from your daily routine without any adverse consequences. Identify your biggest time wasters and think about how to avoid them. However, don’t remove all the fun or relaxing activities from your agenda, as that may lead to burnout.

QUADRANT 1 – IMPORTANT & URGENT	QUADRANT 2 – IMPORTANT & NON-URGENT
Complete banking homework and send it to my professor before 8 pm. Call the plumber to fix the sink in the restaurant ASAP. Respond to emails about the new menu ideas. Take a suit from the laundry to wear on a date this evening.	Start working on the literature review for my thesis. Think about a present for our anniversary with Meg. Apply for the restaurant business course starting next fall. Schedule regular visits to the veterinary clinic. Learn more about the new gym in the town and download its schedule. (See if I can go there early in the morning.)
QUADRANT 3 – NON-IMPORTANT & URGENT	QUADRANT 4 – NON-IMPORTANT & NON-URGENT
Help mom with cleaning. Clean out the apartment before Meg’s visit. Make a new post for the restaurant’s Instagram account. Take a dog for a walk in the evening. Send a message with apologies that I won’t be at the next business club meeting.	Check out what’s new on Instagram. Play PlayStation with Tom. Find a new TV show on Netflix to watch with parents or Meg.

📑 How to Use the Eisenhower Matrix: Step by Step

Implementing the Eisenhower Matrix can be a life-changing experience. You’ll find a step-by-step Matrix manual below if you don’t know how to organize it yourself.

Prioritizing and Managing Tasks

All your assignments must be sorted first: identify high-priority tasks, your overarching goals, and the sub-goals you need to complete. Assessing the importance and urgency of a task might be challenging at first, but it becomes easier with practice. These are the steps for you to take:

1. Ask yourself powerful questions.
   What will happen if you don’t get a task done? Can someone else do it for you? How long have you had this task on your to-do list? These questions will help reveal the importance and urgency of each task.
2. Consider in which quadrant each of your tasks belongs.
   Assess if the task has a concrete deadline or none at all. Those that don’t need your attention immediately but contribute to your long-term success belong in the second quadrant. And the ones you need to do ASAP go into the first quadrant. Don’t worry if your matrix isn’t perfect the first time; it will take a bit of practice to get used to distributing the tasks correctly.
3. Estimate the time required to complete each quadrant.
   This way, you can check if the Eisenhower Matrix works efficiently for you. Organize a trial period of two weeks and use your timer to see how time-consuming each task is.
4. If one of the quadrants takes up all your time, try rearranging your matrix.
   There may be tasks you can delegate, or you might need to reevaluate their priority. This is good if most of your assignments are in the 2nd quadrant! It means that you approach your daily tasks intelligently.

Rebalancing Quadrants

Sometimes you might find yourself stuck in one quadrant for too long and have no energy for others. This is entirely natural, especially during the college years when you are easily overwhelmed with new tasks and experiences. However, this is also a sign to rebalance your matrix. Here’s how to do it:

• Quadrant 1
  If you feel stuck on all the deadlines in the first quadrant, try working on those tasks gradually. Often students postpone doing their assignments until the night before the deadline. Instead, you can try working on your essay 20 minutes a day during the week before the deadline and save yourself from pulling an all-nighter.
• Quadrant 2
  Activities from the second quadrant often end up in the first one because they are easy to neglect. We recommend creating deadlines for yourself for non-urgent tasks. This way, you can work on your long-term goals step-by-step and track your progress.
• Quadrant 3
  Try delegating or eliminating some tasks to minimize your time in this quadrant. For example, high-achieving students often take on too many responsibilities during a group project. Next time you work with a team, don’t be afraid to ask for help or to say “no” to things you don’t want to do.
• Quadrant 4
  It’s OK to unwind from your daily routine and do the fun things you like. However, if your hobbies turn out to be complete wastes of time, it might be better to look for some alternatives. Try relaxing activities that will also be empowering, like walking or journaling. And if you feel like watching some Netflix, make sure you limit the time you allot for it.

⏲️ Tips for Successful Time Management – Hack the Matrix

Consider these tips to ensure you get all the benefits of using the Eisenhower Matrix.

↩️ Conclusion

At college, everyone is rushing to keep up with their schedules. Unfortunately, we can’t create more time in our day, but we can use our time efficiently. The Eisenhower matrix is a universal tool that can improve productivity and teach anyone how to manage their priorities and resources. By using the matrix, you learn which things are worth your time and effort and which aren’t.

The Eisenhower matrix is based on the difference between important and urgent tasks. Learning to distinguish and complete these can significantly affect your progress and personal growth. Once you can easily distinguish between urgent and important tasks, you also better understand what is productive and what isn’t. And this is a great stepping stone toward finding what you want to do in the future.

🔗 References

1. Avoid the “Urgency Trap” with the Eisenhower Matrix
2. The Eisenhower Matrix: How to Prioritize Your To-Do List • Asana
3. The Time Management Matrix: Making The Best Use Of Your Time | BetterHelp
4. How to prioritize work when everything’s important
5. Time Management Skills: Examples and How To Improve Them | Indeed.com
6. 5 Ways to Work and Study at the Same Time – wikiHow
7. 10 Tangible Tips to Balance Working Full-Time and Going to College | Rasmussen University
8. Mastering Time Management for College Students
9. The Pomodoro Technique Really Works for Productivity | The Muse
10. The Eisenhower Matrix: Introduction & 3-Minute Video Tutorial