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✦
Free priority matrix

Urgent is not
the same as important.

Put everything on your plate into four boxes and the week stops being a queue. Saved in this browser, and nothing to sign up for.

Do

Urgent · Important

Today, and before anything below.

Schedule

Not urgent · Important

The quadrant that decides your year. Give it a date.

Delegate

Urgent · Not important

Loud, but not yours. Hand it over or timebox it.

Drop

Not urgent · Not important

Saying no here is what funds the second quadrant.

Then give the second box a real block: Pomodoro timer.

✦ The idea

Why urgency wins, and why it should not.

Urgent things have a property important things lack: they interrupt. A message, a deadline somebody else set, a notification — each arrives announcing itself, and the day fills with them without anyone deciding it should. Meanwhile the work that would make next quarter easier sits quietly in a list, losing to whatever pinged.

The matrix does one thing, and it is enough: it separates the two questions. Once “is this loud” and “does this matter” are asked apart, a surprising amount of the week turns out to be the third box — urgent, not important, and not really yours.

✦ How to sort

The four boxes.

Do — urgent and important

Genuine deadlines and real emergencies. If this box is always full, something upstream is broken.

Schedule — important, not urgent

The box that decides your year. It only survives if it gets a date, not a good intention.

Delegate — urgent, not important

Loud, and somebody else's. Hand it over, or give it a timebox and stop there.

Drop — neither

Saying no here is what funds the second box. This is the hardest one to be honest in.

Be ruthless the first time

Everything feels important while you are holding it. Sort fast, then re-read.

Re-sort weekly

Boxes move. Something in Schedule becomes Do by being ignored long enough.

✦ The part paper cannot do

A matrix is a snapshot.
A week is a moving thing.

Sorting your plate is genuinely clarifying and lasts about three days. Then new things arrive, the second box quietly ages into the first, and you sort it again from scratch — which is why most people do this exercise twice and never again.

EvyOS keeps the sort standing: the second quadrant becomes goals with dates and projects underneath, tasks surface before they are late rather than after, and what is overdue is the first thing you see instead of something you discover.

Start free →See the app
✦ Questions

The matrix, answered.

Four boxes made from two questions: is it urgent, and is it important. Urgent and important gets done now. Important but not urgent gets scheduled, and this is the box that decides your year. Urgent but not important gets delegated or timeboxed. Neither gets dropped. The insight is that urgency is a property of the thing shouting loudest, and has almost nothing to do with whether it matters.
The second: important, not urgent. Planning, learning, relationships, maintenance, the work that prevents next quarter's fire. It never announces itself, so it loses every day to things that do — and saying no in the fourth box is what pays for it.
Yes, in this browser only. It never leaves your device and it is not sent anywhere, which matters because a list of everything on somebody's plate is not casual data. Clearing your site data clears it.
Yes. Copy the plan gives you the four boxes as plain text you can paste into notes, a document or a message.
Give the second box a date, which is the only thing that protects it. That is the point where a matrix stops being an exercise and starts being a plan, and it is the part a piece of paper cannot do for you.

Sorting it took ten minutes.
Protecting it takes a system.

EvyOS turns the second quadrant into goals with dates, projects underneath, and tasks that surface before they are late.

Start for free →