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Deep Dive
Your “to-do” list is growing. A twist on the traditional Eisenhower Matrix can help you prioritize.
On days when my to-do list is so long it doesn't fit on one planner page — yes, this happens, and yes, I still use a paper daily planner as one of my organizational tools — I turn to a version of the Eisenhower Matrix.
Bucketing the chaos by importance and urgency makes sure the right things don't slip through the cracks, even when the list is so long I know I won’t get through it (especially then).
I’ve been using the Eisenhower Matrix since I first learned of it a decade ago, but the version I use today is a little different.
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An Introduction to the Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix, named for its creator, President Eisenhower, and popularized by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is a prioritization tool. It sorts tasks along two axes — important or not, urgent or not — and assigns each a path forward: do it, schedule it, delegate it, or delete it.
It looks like this:
Here’s how it traditionally worked, from the lower left, clockwise:
Delegate: A senior lawyer used the matrix to hand off low-risk NDAs, vendor agreements, and administrative work to a paralegal or a junior (and less expensive) lawyer.
Do: The senior lawyer reviewed the business-critical contracts and major partnership agreements themselves. They called the board member who asked the hard question. They read the filing that just came in on the key litigation.
Schedule: Important, not-urgent work, like annual regulatory filings, drafting essential policies, and updating the company's form of sales agreement, got put on the calendar for later.
Delete: Not important, not urgent work got deleted. If it became urgent someday, presumably someone would raise it again. Think: an NDA for a third party you might want to talk to eventually.
The New Eisenhower Matrix
AI Didn’t Change the Matrix. But It Did Change What Goes In Each Box.
Importance and urgency are still the right way to sort a list. What's changed is what happens once a task lands in a box.
The vendor agreement I would've handed to a junior lawyer five years ago now goes to AI for a first pass. The terms-of-use review I would've shelved until we'd actually settled on a vendor gets a quick AI sanity check instead. Neither one waited or got deleted.
