Dwight Eisenhower was a pretty impressive guy. A five-star General during World War 2 and the 34th president of the United States, it’s fair to say he knew a thing or two about getting things done.
One of his greatest gifts to us mere mortals is this Productivity quadrant or decision making quadrant.
What is Eisenhower’s Productivity Quadrant?
Eisenhower once said that
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Too often we get bogged down with the urgent, but not important. Things which anyone could do and don’t make a huge difference if they are done or not, at least in the short term. It leaves us no time to focus on the important tasks that make a huge difference until they are both urgent and important.
To help sort through his priorities Eisenhower used a simple piece of paper and a quadrant to help insure the important got done.
As you can see from the grid every task can be placed somewhere on the grid. Something like putting out a fire is both urgent and important where as playing a video game is unlikely to be important or urgent (Feel free to prove me wrong in the comments).
This can be a great way to help you get past procrastination (but realising that it is neither important nor urgent) or focus on the important tasks which only you can do. It may even help you delegate more tasks to other people. There are a few tools which can help you do this, but Todoists filters have a super simple way to organise your task via filters.
What Are Todoist Filters
Todoist filters are basically another form of list. You can use these to select items where one or two criteria apply to them. This allows them more flexibility than just having a list of items for today, or items which are part of a certain project or context.
Returning to the topic of this post, Todoist makes it really easy to set up filters to follow Esienhower’s productivity quadrant.
Urgent and Important
This is going to be the filter you’ll want to check first. It’s really simple to set up too and there are a couple of options for you. Either way you will use tasks which are due today (code = “tod”) or you can set up a slightly larger range like the current week (the code is “7 days”)
To make sure you have “Urgent” tasks, you can either use priority levels (I don’t like using priority levels as it can take more time to enter the task and also I feel something is either important…or not). In this case you’d use the code “priority X” x being the level that is your top priority.
Or you can set up a label for important tasks like @High (to show it is a high priority). This can make it easier to input an urgent task and creates a simpler system in my opinion than using priority levels as you are limited to only two or three levels of priority (high, medium, low) and you can type your priorities when you input a task rather than having to click or tap on the priority option (I know this seems like very little effort but you want it to be as easy to add this data as possible to help encourage that habit).
So my filter is “tod & @High”.
Important and Not Urgent
It can be very useful to see your urgent tasks that are coming up in the distant, but not immediately urgent. This can help you not get caught up by a sudden rush of deadlines. The simplest way is to use an urgent priority or label as we previously discussed (e.g. @High) and then use an excluding filter (an exclamation mark before the query for example !7days) for the time period that you don’t consider urgent. Personally, I have two here one for within the week (which I actually consider “urgent” as I mentioned above) and then a second which is in the further future with the syntax “@high !7 days” this means I see urgent tasks that are coming more than a week in the future.
Urgent and Not Important
This is where using priority levels makes it easier to create good filters. In this case you simple chose your time period (such as today) and use a lower priority level. If you are using labels for your priorities then you can create a lower priority (such as “@low”) or even simpler use an excluding filter which is an exclamation mark before the filter. So for example !@High to exclude important filters.
Neither Important Nor Urgent
Honestly, I don’t have a filter for these tasks as I probably want to ignore them and hopefully can eliminate them during my weekly review or merely wait for them to arrive later on in my “urgent but not important” list.
Having said that, I also use a set of time based labels with my tasks, so many of these tasks are also labeled “under 5 mins” or “under 25 mins” and so when I have 5 minutes free, I can look at these lists. More on this another time.
Just One option
This is just one option for filters but is a very powerful option. They’re great for helping you to plan your day (or week) ahead and help you delegate tasks. Filters are a really powerful part of Todoist and are really easy to create unlike some other todo apps (like Omnifocuses perspective). I’m still experimenting to find the best set of Filters but I love these very simple filters already.
Eric Dye says
VERY interesting…
Jacob says
Thanks for the post. How do you see the connection with priorities in Todoist? I’m using them for the Eisenhower quadrant. So the most important and urgent are redre red and appear on top, after that the important tasks in dark blue, and so on.
Chris Wilson says
To be honest Jacob, I don’t use the built in Priorities as I want to be able to add my tasks just from the keyboard and not have to touch a screen or mouse at all. I’d agree that Red should be more important though and I’m glad they work for you.
Seth Koenig says
You know, you can enter a Todoist priority level with the “!!” tag. For instance;
Buy milk !!2
This puts the Todoist priority level at level 2 without having to pick up a mouse.
Chris Wilson says
No I didn’t Seth! That’s brilliant! Right I’m now going to start using the actual priorities. Awesome. Thanks so much.
Hanna says
Nice post. Love it. Priority is vvey important when making a to do list. I am using Efficient to do list to organize tasks and prioritize all the entries with its color coded labels.