Hop into the (Eisenhower) Matrix!

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

Dwight Eisenhower

I might have mentioned it before. I possess a unique set of abilities I like to call Mad Organisation Skills. They help me deal with the outbursts of my creativity, otherwise I’d be a person with a lot of projects started and unfinished – you know the type. Recently I’ve been talking with some teachers who mentioned they could use some help to organise their work, so I shared with them the tool that I discovered some time ago and it’s proven to be a great help. I’m glad to mention that some of those teachers decided to give it a go and their feedback was generally enthusiastic.

So, if you want to try, here it is: the Eisenhower Matrix!

What’s the Eisenhower Matrix?

If your first connotation with the name Eisenhower is the American president Dwight Eisenhower, you got that right. Being a busy and extremely productive person, he invented a matrix which helps us prioritise things by urgency and importance. It looks like this:

As you can see, we have two aspects that help us prioritise things, importance and urgency. Important activities lead us to achieving our goals, and urgent activities demand immediate attention.

The problem is that we usually focus on the urgent activities because the consequences of not dealing with them are immediate. Now, the power of the Eisenhower Matrix is that we can see through the firefighting activities and find enough time to do what’s really important – and that’s something vital if we want to work on multiple projects or monitor various aspects of life.

How do you work with the Matrix? First, you need some time to reflect on the tasks and activities you need to complete in the foreseeable future. Then you need to divide them into the following categories:

• Important and urgent (priority 1: do it now)
• Important but not urgent (priority 2: schedule a time to do it)
• Not important but urgent (priority 3: find someone do to this for you)
• Not important and not urgent (priority 4: eliminate it)

The way I like to work requires some physical representation of my work being done, hence I use post-it notes which I stick to my Eisenhower Matrix (actually I use two charts, one for work and one for regular life) – I review it every day (work) and every week (regular life) and remove the tasks I’ve completed, move the tasks if necessary (usually some of them go from priority 2 to priority 1 section) and place new post-its with the new tasks. That’s how I know:

• what’s really important and really urgent at the moment
• how much time I’ll probably need to complete the most important tasks
• is it possible for me to accept new tasks (and if not – clearly explain why + suggest the time I’d be able to accept them)
• how to plan my free time realistically (I hate taking part in social events with my mind still focused on the things I need to complete)

So, that’s how the Matrix works for me. But what about you?

How can you use the Eisenhower Matrix in your work?

The Eisenhower Matrix is a great tool when it comes to teaching. It can help you not only in a day-by-day organisation, but you can use it to plan your whole school year.

Organise your admin work: how many times have you felt overwhelmed by the admin aspects of teaching? Writing reports, calling parents, designing tests – they take up a lot of your time, but if you divide them into smaller chunks and place on the Matrix, it will be easier for you to deal with them.

Course planning: there are many things you need to take into consideration before you start teaching – books, course plan, syllabus, matching students’ needs etc. If you take all these aspects and place them on a matrix, it will be much easier for you to organise your work.

Lesson planning: there’s always so much to do and so little time, isn’t it? Using this simple matrix you may set up the priorities of the lesson and rearrange it. For instance, if you see your students need more time to work on Present Perfect, place it into important and/or urgent (depending on the situation) – this will make it easier for you to plan the whole lesson.

How can you use the Eisenhower Matrix with your students?

Apart from your own use, you can share the matrix with your students and encourage them to use it in two main aspects:

Learning organiser: you can spend a lesson with your students on organising their learning process – January is a perfect month to do it as the power of the New Year Resolution is still strong. They could discuss their priorities, the activities they spend too much time on (like downloading learning apps they will never use) and the tasks they should focus on (like communicating in English).

Vocabulary organiser: you will find the Eisenhower Matrix really useful when dealing with vocabulary, only I’d suggest changing the aspects and go with important and useful (instead of urgent). Then, all you need to do is write the new items on post-it notes and place them in the appropriate parts of the matrix. Let the students decide which items are more important than others, and motivate them to use those they marked as useful!

I hope you’ll try the Eisenhower Matrix and have fun with this tool. You can learn more about it and download useful stuff on its website: www.eisenhower.me.

Enjoy!