Your calendar isn’t overloaded.
It’s under-prioritized.
Fix it this week.
The Eisenhower Matrix is simple:
- Important & Urgent
- Important & Non-Urgent
- Unimportant & Urgent
- Unimportant & Non-Urgent
Eisenhower used it to separate what demands attention from what deserves it; Covey turned it into a daily habit. For a scaling founder, this isn’t theory—it’s survival. Run your week through it and three shifts happen fast:
Important & Urgent gets calmer
Only real fires: customer outages, payroll, legal deadlines. Give them a lane and a limit.
Example: Shopify famously killed recurring meetings to free time for real work—true urgency got easier to handle.
Important & Non-Urgent finally ships
This is where growth lives: hiring leaders, pricing updates, partner moves, systems.
Example: Basecamp protects maker time so teams do real deep work.
Unimportant gets filtered
Inboxes and pings masquerade as urgent. Use simple triage: if it doesn’t move a key outcome, defer, delegate, or delete.
A 5-Day Eisenhower Sprint
Day 1 — Dump: List every task/meeting. Tag outcome-moving vs noise.
Day 2 — Sort: Place each item into a quadrant. Color-code your calendar to match.
Day 3 — Urgent/Important: Time-box + batch so emergencies stop owning the day.
Day 4 — Important/Non-Urgent: Block two daily focus windows—protect them like investor meetings.
Day 5 — Unimportant: If it recurs twice, document + hand off. If it’s neither urgent nor important, delete or park for quarterly review.
Field checks (use these all week)
If it doesn’t move revenue, profit, or capacity, it isn’t Important.
If it impacts a customer promise or a firm deadline, it’s Urgent.
If everything is urgent, nothing is important.
If your Important/Non-Urgent blocks get bumped, you’re choosing busy over growth.
🧠 In Summary
Urgency gets attention. Importance earns protection. Make that visible with the matrix, then run your week from Important & Non-Urgent so growth compounds.
What’s one task you’ll move into Important & Non-Urgent this week, and when will you block time for it?