The Eisenhower Matrix – Tools for Junior Leaders
Leadership as a company-grade leader continually presents challenges that assess a leader’s character and abilities. While some decisions may be routine, such as managing additional duties, managing supply requests, or overseeing training schedules, others are more significant and can influence the organization’s success or failure. The importance of effective decision-making for company-grade officers cannot be overstated. Decisions made at this level have the most direct impact on your organization’s mission. As you advance throughout your career, the challenges will be more complex and have broader implications. Therefore, honing your decision-making skills now equips you with the tools necessary to navigate the dynamics of tomorrow.
Enter the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is a mental tool focused on task prioritization. The Eisenhower Matrix was popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who remarked in a 1954 speech addressing the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Using the Eisenhower Matrix ensures that important tasks don’t get overshadowed by less significant ones and can allow junior officers to be able to tell the difference between the two.
As a logistics officer in two high operational tempo organizations early in my career, I initially felt overwhelmed with information overload. I became caught up in tasks that could have been better handled by my subordinate leaders, which I tried to take care of myself. Meanwhile, some important responsibilities that would have been a better use of my time had to be either completed last minute or simply fell short of the suspense. I struggled with prioritizing and deciding what was urgent, what was important, what was both, and what was neither. This decision-making tool has helped me with these distinctions, and it can be your compass amid chaos, guiding you to what truly matters.
Understanding the Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix helps categorize tasks based on a four-quadrant placement: important, not important, urgent, and not urgent. These can be further explained below:
Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important (Do This)
Understand: This quadrant involves tasks that require immediate attention and should take priority over other tasks. This quadrant and the events that belong here are simple to understand. The problem arises when events or situations are deemed urgent and important but may be neither. Miscataloging events mentally into this quadrant drowns out our ability to prioritize and focus on what truly needs our attention.
Situation: You are conducting a field exercise, and you receive a report that a Soldier has been injured. Shortly afterward, you learn that a critical piece of equipment is required for an upcoming mission has failed. Both incidents demand immediate action.
Action: As the situation dictates, these tasks require immediate attention and should take priority over other tasks. Coordinate with medics for the injured Soldier and initiate a resupply request. Tasks in this quadrant can and should necessitate dropping other tasks, such as attending a meeting or conducting counseling. Understand and communicate when something is urgent and important and work to delegate and reschedule other tasks accordingly. Given their criticality, these tasks should not be what you attempt to multi-task or push to someone else.
Quadrant 2: Not Urgent but Important (Schedule This)
Understand: This quadrant likely includes most of your tasks. While they are important but not immediately urgent, neglecting them could cause them to escalate into Quadrant 1 tasks, increasing their likelihood of being hastily executed or forgotten. Many standard tasks or events we do in the Army that we all recognize as important can be planned well in advance to create stability and predictability for your Soldiers.
Situation: You are preparing rater and senior rater comments for your platoon’s NCOERs or are working with your Platoon Sergeant to develop your training plan for the next quarter. Counselings, PT tests, or pre-training walkthroughs and certifications are also critical but foreseeable in advance. Do not brush these off as continually reschedulable because they will all eventually be critical if not addressed.
Action: The key to tackling these tasks effectively, is to make scheduling them a priority as soon as you acknowledge they are important. Set aside time and meeting space to review resources and go over updates to developing plans. Find friction and identify problems early before they become urgent. Stick to the schedule of important events and only reschedule if a quadrant 1 event arises and disrupts you. Work to minimize urgent but not important (quadrant 3) tasks getting in the way of executing important events that can be planned and managed well in advance.
Quadrant 3: Urgent but not Important (Delegate This)
Understand: This quadrant is a productivity killer. These tasks need to be completed, but they don’t impact long-term goals and don’t necessarily require you specifically to work on them. Delegating these tasks is an efficient way to manage your workload and empower your team to assist you in completing them. The most important intended outcome of using the Eisenhower matrix as a mental productivity tool is ensuring these tasks don’t slow you down so you can prioritize your focus on quadrant 1 and 2 responsibilities.
Situation: You’re a platoon leader conducting a rehearsal with your NCOs for an operation happening the next day, which is vital to the success of the organization. Suddenly, a peer calls requesting your help to sort out a seating arrangement for an upcoming promotion ceremony next week. An email comes through asking for an update on Company Class III supplies due ASAP. A text hits your NCO’s phone asking for all of them to come help do the arms room inventory. Addressing any of these situations feels important, but they are actually derailing your organization’s true mission.
Action: Tasks in this quadrant are primed for delegation. Empower your team to manage these tasks by assigning responsibility to manage updates, track information, or respond to non-critical issues that don’t require your influence. Identify and clearly separate these tasks from those in quadrant 1, which are urgent and important. By delegating effectively, you ensure that your team feels empowered to take ownership, freeing leadership to make optimal decisions and maintain a ‘balcony perspective’ to see your team succeed.
Quadrant 4: Not urgent and not important (Delete This)
Understand: Identify the tasks, habits, and activities that are time-consuming and don’t contribute meaningfully to the success of the organization. Low-impact projects that don’t align with your unit’s goals can also fall into this quadrant. Reducing your time on these tasks allows more time in quadrants one and two to make the most impact.
Situation: In situations where you might be micromanaging your platoon or spending too much time on low-priority tasks, you may feel helpful in ensuring your Soldiers are completing their tasks, but these tasks can detract from more critical duties. Examples include excess or unnecessary meetings where your input isn’t needed or micromanaging your fully capable NCOs when you should be refining the plan, or gathering other information your NCOs need to succeed.
Action: Use this quadrant to identify habits or activities that consume time but don’t contribute to the organization’s success. Identifying these may be hard but understanding what can be omitted when more important or urgent tasks present themselves is important. We cannot add more time to our day but we can make room for important tasks by omitting these.
The Eisenhower Matrix can effectively prioritize your time, maximize productivity, and minimize distractions if leveraged appropriately. This means focusing on mission-critical tasks and supporting your commander’s guidance and intent. This results in your time being spent on what truly matters, such as soldier welfare and readiness, mission planning, and organizational readiness.
Mastering this tool requires time and the development of a new habit. As I’ve experienced, regularly updating the matrix mentally or in a physical or digital form, can be time-consuming. Failing to do so, however, leads to a reactive rather than proactive leadership style where these tasks are bleeding into each other. For company grade officers, this tool helps navigate the unique challenges of leadership, whether dealing with external demands of higher headquarters or internal issues within your team. While this is just one of many tools to improve your decision-making skills, implementing the Eisenhower Matrix can lead to greater success in managing your unit, achieving mission objectives, and developing your soldiers.
Authors Biography
CPT Jakob Hutter is a Kansas Army National Guard logistics officer currently serving as the Battalion S3 for the 169th Division Sustainment Support Battalion in Leavenworth, Kansas. In addition, he also serves as a Troop Command Brigade Training Officer. He has a Master of Science in Organizational Leadership and received his commission from Kansas State University in 2016. He is passionate about the science of Army logistics, the art of military leadership, and combining both to provide effective sustainment.
