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Eisenhower Matrix Prioritization.

Learn how to use the classic Eisenhower Matrix to cut through chaos, focus on what truly matters, and make faster, smarter decisions as a small business owner.

Feeling overwhelmed by your never-ending to-do list? In this episode, Henry Lopez explains how to use the Eisenhower Matrix—a simple yet powerful framework—to prioritize your daily tasks and regain control of your time.

Originally developed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, and later popularized by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the matrix helps business owners separate what’s urgent from what’s important, so they can focus on activities that truly move their business forward instead of reacting to every fire.

Henry walks through how this framework complements the Big Rocks time management approach (Episode 569) and why most entrepreneurs mistakenly live in “urgent mode,” constantly firefighting instead of leading strategically. He also shares how the Eisenhower Matrix inspired the creation of his free Task Management Tool (see download instructions below), co-developed with his son-in-law, Colin Rhoades, using AI technology.

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Henry and Colin also discuss how AI made it possible to create this simple browser-based productivity tool in just a few hours – proof that automation can make business life simpler in more ways than one.

Listen now to learn how to:

• Reduce overwhelm by categorizing tasks by urgency and importance.

• Identify your “Big Rocks” and schedule them intentionally.

• Use the Eisenhower Matrix for daily and even hourly decision-making.

Other Podcast Episodes:

Episode 569: Big Rocks

Time Management & Productivity Episodes

Henry Lopez (00:13):

Welcome to the How of Business podcast. This is Henry Lopez. On this episode, I’m going to discuss one of the simplest and most effective tools for prioritizing your to-do list. The Eisenhower Matrix. I’ll explain how the Eisenhower Matrix a classic, simple, yet powerful tool can help you separate the urgent from the truly important so you can stay focused on what moves your business forward and avoid getting stuck in constant reaction mode and the exhaustion that can come from not being able to get everything done on your to-do list. Also, share a free download tool that’ll help you use the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize your day. You can find all of the Howa business resources, including the show notes page for this episode, and learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching programs@thehowabusiness.com. I also invite you to join the Howa business community on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any new episodes.

Henry Lopez (01:05):

As small business owners, we’re trying to juggle dozens if not hundreds of decisions on a daily basis. And unlike in our previous life as employees, I, for myself as a corporate employee, someone else or some group of people directed my work to a big degree, what project to work on, what opportunity to pursue, what tasks I had to get completed by a certain date. But then when we become business owners, there’s no one else dictating that for us. We have to manage all of that. And so inevitably what happens is we end up with the biggest to-do list and it all seems like it’s critical items, critical decisions that have to be made, important tasks that have to be completed. But the reality is that we simply don’t have enough hours in the day to get to it all. And the other reality is sometimes we don’t need to get to it all.

Henry Lopez (01:49):

We have to focus on what’s most important, but without some kind of a prioritization system, it’s pretty hard to do that. And so you usually, as most of us do, you surrender to just kind of going down the list and checking things off. Sometimes we will purposely, I’m guilty of this as well, go to the kind of the easiest one next, putting off the things that you know are going to take a lot of work and effort or that are hard decisions to make. But that approach just leads to continuous overwhelm and feeling like you can never get it all done and that just doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t scale. So you need a prioritization method, and what I’m sharing with you today is the Eisenhower Matrix. This technique of applying the Eisenhower Matrix I think works best for deciding right now today, this hour, this morning, what do I work on next from the list of things that I have to work on.

Henry Lopez (02:39):

And that’s where it comes into play. It’s a prioritization, a task prioritization tool to help you be that much more effective and to take control of your to-do list. So we’ve developed a free tool that you can download from the show notes page from this episode called the Task Management Tool, and it’ll apply the Eisenhower matrix and give you a very simple to use graphical app that’ll help you with prioritizing your task. I encourage you to download that free tool from the show notes page of this episode@thehowbusiness.com. What I want you to think about and accept and understand is that being busier or applying more hours, it doesn’t necessarily equate to productivity. It definitely doesn’t scale. And so I want to share with you the Eisenhower Matrix, if you haven’t used it before, as a way of working more intentionally instead of reactively and just continuing to put items on your to-do list and working them sequentially, it becomes overwhelming, it becomes exhausting, it becomes paralyzing, and we need something more.

Henry Lopez (03:37):

And that’s where the Eisenhower Matrix can really help. Prioritization and learning how to do it best is really a superpower for business owners. It’s related of course to the broader topic of time management, but that’s the limited resource that we have is that time that we have on a daily and weekly basis and we don’t want to throw any more at it. Certainly there are crunch times when we do, but we have to get away from this constant urgency, constant fire drill that leads to exhaustion and stagnation and without a method, we default to running to the next fire, answering emails, immediately, handling interruptions as they come our way. We’re teaching our staff, if we have a staff to immediately come to us with questions instead of grouping them or batching them or trying to solve them themselves, we create this environment of chaos and that leads to all kinds of problems including decision fatigue that can happen very quickly to us as business owners.

Henry Lopez (04:31):

So it’s a mindset shift to a big extent. You probably don’t need to do everything on your to-do list. You need to focus on the most important things, the most urgent things, the tasks that are most related to your big rocks and that overall are going to move the needle on your business. That hour, that day, that week on episode 5 69, I introduced the concept of big rocks and hopefully you’ve been applying that or some other method to prioritizing your week tied with some level of weekly planning. I always recommend either Sunday evening or Monday morning where you’re identifying here are the three to five big rocks, the most important things that I need to accomplish this week. And just again for a quick definition, a big rock is something that I can complete in about half an hour to two hours, and then ideally I schedule time for those big rocks as appropriate or portions of those big rocks where I need to bring my full attention and the best of myself.

Henry Lopez (05:25):

So those big rocks can scheduled first. That doesn’t change. But then daily as you are planning and trying to figure out what to do next as you’re working your to-do list, as you’re deciding this new item, this new task that has fallen onto my plate, how do I prioritize that? Do I jump on that now or do I put it on the list? Do I wait? That’s where quickly using the Eisenhower Matrix I think can really improve your productivity and help you manage your time and help you prioritize big rocks. Define your direction quarterly and then weekly. Where do I want to go this week? What’s most important and a tool like the Eisenhower Matrix defines your daily or even hourly execution. So as I mentioned, Dwight d Eisenhower, who was the World War II Supreme Commander, and of course then US president, he is credited with developing the Eisenhower matrix and here’s a quote from him about this that I think is relevant.

Henry Lopez (06:21):

What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important. I think there’s a lot in there about managing a business, and we need to instead create and nurture an environment that on most days operates without chaos. So Eisenhower used this approach, this matrix when he was trying to manage competing priorities across the military, the politics of the time, and all of his global responsibilities. This approach, the Eisenhower Matrix, interestingly enough, as was Big Rocks, was later then again formalized and popularized by Stephen Cubby in his famous book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m going to have a visual of the Eisenhower Matrix on the show notes page, but as you’re visualizing, picture a two by two grid and across the top you have urgent and not urgent in the two boxes from left to right at the top. And now on the side on the left hand side, you have important on the first row and not important on the second row.

Henry Lopez (07:21):

So the top right, which is important but not urgent, that’s where things like your strategy, growth, leadership tasks, those kinds of things typically fall in that quadrant. They’re important for you to do these things, but not right at this moment necessarily. But most of us, we live in the urgent quadrant, whether it’s important or not important because again, we’re firefighting, it’s whatever comes to its next. It’s whatever problem or question someone brings us, it’s whatever we observe, we jump right on that. And so instead, we need to intentionally move work into quadrant two and really deal with what’s truly urgent. Again, to layer in big rocks. Big rocks are typically in that second quadrant important but not urgent. Those are the things I’m planning to work on this week. They’re not surprises. I’ve allocated time blocks perhaps to work on those things. And so those are planned activities.

Henry Lopez (08:17):

It is probably on my calendar ideally, not necessarily on my to-do list, although you certainly could combine the two. But this Eisenhower Matrix really is best for all of those other things that come up throughout the day. All of those other decisions that you have to make and think about it as it applies to decisions beyond just tasks. One of the things that can help us avoid decision fatigue, where we get to the point where we just feel like I can’t make another decision, is to not try to make all the decisions all the time. Immediately as they come to you, prioritize them using this matrix and focus only on making the decisions that fall into that top quadrant to the left, the urgent and important quadrant. If the bulk of your day is spent putting out fires, dealing with a crisis, dealing with a deadline or something that was due yesterday dealing with pressing issues, the fires of the day, if that’s where you spend the bulk of your day, day after day, I assure you something is broken either because you are creating a chaotic environment or something is broken in the process.

Henry Lopez (09:18):

Ideally you’re spending a smaller portion of your day on those important per urgent, and instead focusing on the important but not urgent where you have the time that you need to get those things done right so that you can bring the best of you to those decisions and responsibilities. So let me tell you again about this free task management tool that you can download from the show notes page for this episode at the how of business.com. This is a tool, simple tool that you can use to help you apply the Eisenhower matrix to your to-do list today or to decisions that come your way on a daily basis. It’s not meant to replace more formal task management tools like Clickup or Slack or anything like that, especially if you’re using that in your environment to collaborate on projects. This is a simple tool for you to use to prioritize your to-dos, to help you determine what you should focus on.

Henry Lopez (10:11):

Now, what’s most important and urgent, and I had the privilege of working with my son-in-law, Colin Rhodes, who actually developed this, and here’s a conversation I had with him about the experience of helping me develop this idea and then also using AI to develop the tool. Colin has a great ability for things technical, but just learning and he really applies himself in a lot of different ways. And so I challenged him recently. I wanted to come up with a task prioritization tool, and I’ve seen a couple of them out there that are spreadsheet based, Excel spreadsheet based, and so I asked him, Hey, could you help me create a version of this task management tool and a spreadsheet? And he said, well, let’s do one better. What if we used AI to create a tool? I was like, huh, okay. I hadn’t thought about that, so I wanted him to chat.

Henry Lopez (11:00):

Although this episode is about task management, I just want to take a tangent here and talk about how he used AI to create this tool that is a free download that you can find on the show notes page for this episode@thehowabusiness.com. But let me back up. When I shared to you, Hey, could you help me build this tool in Excel? And of course I came to you because I knew you had extensive Excel knowledge and you know how to use Excel, but immediately why was it that you thought, wait a second, maybe we can build an app using ai?

Colin Rhoades (11:30):

Well, I knew with Excel it would be very basic on what we could create here, and I had recently read an article of a guy creating an app through chat GBT solely through a very basic prompt within 30 minutes. So I had that idea in my head and I wanted to explore that further. So I kind of took concept and threw it into chat GBT through a very basic prompt. And very quickly, I would say under an hour, I had a fairly robust version one working prototype of this matrix

Henry Lopez (12:06):

And it’s says self-contained. We’ll call it an app, right? To keep it simple. It runs in your browser. So it’s coding, but the coding was done by chat GPT, is that correct?

Colin Rhoades (12:17):

Fully? Yeah. I have no coding experience or background, so I’ve fully relied on chat GPT to write the code, and really it came up with the idea to write the code. I didn’t give it any instructions, guidance. I really didn’t know what it was going to do when I prompted it and it kind of offered this suggestion in this path with the code it wrote.

Henry Lopez (12:38):

Did you keep track of any estimate of how many hours it took total? I mean, obviously we went back and forth, so let me describe the process. You came up with an initial prototype and then we reviewed it. It was rough of course, as we would imagine, but I would say even that initial version was probably 80% there. What would you say? I mean, functionality, you really haven’t changed the essentials of it. It’s just been fine tuning little things. Is that fair?

Colin Rhoades (13:01):

That is fair. Yeah. I would say probably about three to four hours to get the foundation built. Right, and then over the course of what I would say, one to two months, maybe you and I would go back and forth and work and look for new features to add, I would say all in maybe eight hours total. Yeah,

Henry Lopez (13:20):

Amazing. In that period of time. And you were able to develop a fairly functional, robust app without having any coding knowledge or background.

Colin Rhoades (13:30):

It’s really incredible what this platform can do, what we can all do now. Like many, I’ve been enthralled with chat chit this year and really just try to work it into my daily life looking for new novel use cases.

Henry Lopez (13:44):

Thanks again to Colin for all the work that he’s done to develop this tool and for sharing his experience with using Chat GPT to do so. So I want to leave you with this concept of not trying to work endlessly, but to work intentionally. You simply will not be able to get everything done on your to-do list. If you have any kind of a complex or typical small business and the things that are thrown on you on a daily basis or that have to be done or the decisions that have to be made, it all rests on you or you and your partners. And if you don’t apply some way of planning and then on a daily basis, some way to prioritize, you will become overwhelmed. If you’re not already, it’ll become frustrating. You’ll start to hate doing this. You’ll end up with decision fatigue and feel burnt out about your business in general.

Henry Lopez (14:35):

Instead, apply the big rocks method to weekly planning. Of course, at a higher level, it should be tied to some sort of a strategic plan and a quarterly plan, and then on a daily basis in particular, on those days when you’ve got a lot of things to do, a lot of decisions, quickly apply the Eisenhower Matrix as a way to prioritize. And you can use the free tool that I’m offering you or just do it on a piece of paper, draw out the quadrants and use it at any point where you’re feeling overwhelmed or you’ve got a long list of to-dos. Put everything in as proper quadrant to help you determine what really needs to be done next, and you’ll feel like you make so much more progress on the things that matter as opposed to feeling at the end of the day or at the end of the week, I’m exhausted, I worked like crazy, yet I don’t know if it really moved the business forward.

Henry Lopez (15:22):

If you’re feeling like that, you’re not alone. It’s very common to have a chaotic, small business environment, but it is within your control to change it. So I encourage you to take this approach, apply these tools to help you take control over your time and to minimize, if not, eliminate the chaos in your business environment.