In the autumn of 1843, Charles Dickens walked fifteen and twenty miles a night through the black streets of London. His friend John Forster wrote that the walks went on "many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed." He was composing a Christmas story on foot. By day he owed his readers a novel.

The novel was Martin Chuzzlewit, and it was selling badly. Each monthly number of Pickwick and Nickleby had found 40,000 to 50,000 buyers. Chuzzlewit had fallen to little over 20,000. Dickens had already shipped his hero to America to lift the sales. His contract let Chapman & Hall take £50 a month out of the £200 they paid him for authorship, and the firm had dropped a hint that it might use the clause. His wife, Catherine, was expecting their fifth child in January.

In the first week of October he went to Manchester to preside at the opening of its Athenaeum, and the idea for a Christmas book came to him there. A week after he got home, he started writing it. Nobody had asked for it. He would publish it on his own account, on commission, and carry the costs himself.

He kept writing Chuzzlewit the whole time, with both books, in Forster's words, "in hand." The monthly number took the days. The Christmas story took the gaps and the nights, and Forster records that Dickens "wept over it, and laughed, and wept again." He finished before the end of November. A Christmas Carol came out a few days before Christmas, with gilt edges and colored plates by John Leech, at five shillings, and the six thousand copies of the first edition were gone before Christmas Eve.

That autumn Dickens carried two pieces of work. One had a printer waiting for it every month. The other had no one waiting at all, and it had the one date that no publisher could move.

The Why

The Eisenhower Matrix puts two questions to every task. A task is urgent when a consequence lands within days if nobody acts. It is important when it moves your own work toward what you are trying to make. Two answers to each question give four boxes, and the instruction for each box runs from "do it now" in the first to "drop it" in the last.

Dickens's autumn sorts cleanly. The Chuzzlewit number was urgent and important: a contract with a monthly date, and the money that ran the household. The Christmas story was important and urgent to nobody. That second box is the one the grid exists to protect.

The grid's namesake, Dwight D. Eisenhower, commanded the Allied forces in Europe and later served two terms as president. At Northwestern University in Evanston on August 19, 1954, addressing the World Council of Churches, he said: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." He credited the line to "a former college president" and never gave a name. Eisenhower had himself been president of Columbia University until January 1953. The popular version, with "seldom," comes from a listener's retelling that same year.

The four boxes as most people draw them appear in Stephen Covey's 1989 book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which numbers them one through four. In Covey's scheme the second quadrant holds the important work that nothing forces, and he urges readers to give it most of their time once the first is handled. FranklinCovey, the training company that teaches his habits, lists creative thinking in that quadrant beside planning and learning.

The sorting happens on paper, one task at a time, and the paper shows how empty Quadrant 2 has been.

The How

Four passes on paper turn a crowded week into a map. The first run takes under an hour.

  1. List everything. Write down every task, project, promise, and loose end that takes up room in your head. The ones you avoid go on the list too. Put the novel that exists only as an outline on the same page as the invoice and the dentist. Dickens's list for October 1843 would have held the next Chuzzlewit number, the Manchester speech, a stack of unpaid bills, a baby due in January, and one line for a Christmas book. Keep writing until two minutes pass with nothing new. Sorting starts after the list ends.
  2. Rate for importance. Circle each item that moves your own body of work forward, and leave the rest alone. Your goals set importance, and other people's calendars set urgency. The Christmas story earned its circle from a cause Dickens had already taken up. That September he had written what he called "a sledge-hammer account of the Ragged schools," the free schools for destitute children, and he had seen the one at Field Lane for himself. The Carol carried the same subject to a paying public. A client's third logo revision can be urgent and still get no circle.
  3. Rate for urgency. Underline each item where a consequence arrives within days: a contract date, a submission deadline, a payment that bounces. The Chuzzlewit number earned its underline every month, because a printer and twenty thousand readers were waiting for it. In October the Christmas story's only deadline sat ten weeks away, and a Christmas book that reaches the shops in January has missed its season. Leave every "should" and "soon" bare. Put anything unclear to a two-day test: a reply someone asks for today gets no underline if two days of silence cost nothing.
  4. Place and plan. Draw the grid and drop each item into its box. Urgent and important items land in Quadrant 1 and get done today. Quadrant 2 takes the important work that can wait, and it gets an end date and fixed blocks in the calendar before anything else is booked. What is urgent to others and unimportant to your work goes to Quadrant 3, and it gets batched or handed off. Whatever is left sits in Quadrant 4, and you cross it off. Toni Morrison worked this way for years while she held a nine-to-five job as an editor at Random House. She told The Paris Review in 1993 that with small children she "needed to use the time before they said, 'Mama,'" and "that was always around five in the morning." The office owned her Quadrant 1, and her Quadrant 2 owned the dark.

Tips and Tricks

  • Book Quadrant 2 before the week fills. On the weekend, put the Quadrant 2 blocks in the calendar before anything else goes in. Morrison's pages came before the house woke. Everything booked later has to fit around them.
  • Wall off Quadrant 3 in batches. Donald Knuth, the Stanford computer scientist, has had no email address since January 1, 1990. His secretary pulls out the postal mail he has been waiting for, and everything else goes into "a buffer storage area" that he empties in batch mode about one day every six months. "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things," he writes. "But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Two fixed email windows a day build a lower version of the same wall.
  • Review the week by quadrant. Once a week, add up the hours each box received. The totals show which quadrant the week served.
  • Keep Quadrant 2 in sight. Pin the outline, the mood board, or the demo list where you look each morning. Urgent work sends reminders, and important work sends none, so give it a place on the wall.
  • Defend Quadrant 2 like a client deadline. Someone will ask for the morning you blocked for the manuscript. Say you are booked and offer another time. A paying client who held that slot would get the same answer. Move the block once, and the next person who asks will expect the same.

Mistakes to Avoid

  • Taking volume for urgency. A client's "quick question" arrives flagged high priority, and the flag carries it into Quadrant 1. Rate it by what happens after a two-day wait. If nothing breaks, it belongs in Quadrant 3.
  • Letting Quadrant 2 ripen into Quadrant 1. Weeks before the manuscript of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was due, Douglas Adams had written 25 pages, and the deadline had already been extended again and again. His editor at Pan Books, Sonny Mehta, stayed with him until the book was done, and it came out in November 1984. Adams later said he was unhappy with it. Important work left without a date eventually gets one from someone else, and that date comes at the worst price.
  • Filing everything under Quadrant 1. A grid with every item urgent and important has sorted nothing. Go back to step 3 and put the two-day test to each item again.
  • Handing off Quadrant 2. Quadrant 3 work can go to an assistant, a template, or a later batch. The novel, the album, and the portfolio stay with you, because the Eisenhower Matrix keeps important work with the person who owns it.
  • Counting replies as output. Fifty answered emails leave a clean inbox and the same unwritten chapter. Measure Quadrant 2 in what it produced: pages, bars, frames.

What Goes Unmade

Neglect in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 arrives with names attached: a late fee or an angry client. Neglect in Quadrant 2 sends no bill. An editor calls about a late manuscript, and nobody calls about a book that was never started.

That silence explains why a Christmas story needed a man on the streets at night. Every other demand on Dickens that autumn had a person attached. The printer waited for copy, and the bills waited for payment. The Carol came with nobody. Had he spent October on the demands that knocked, it would have stayed an idea he once had in Manchester.

The album that stays a voice memo and the film that stays a treatment sit in the same box. The Eisenhower Matrix gives the unmade work a box on the page, so that its absence shows. The box does nothing about the pull that keeps it empty.

Why Urgency Wins

In 2018, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee published five experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research. People picked tasks with objectively lower payoffs over tasks with better ones when the worse tasks carried only "spurious urgency." An illusion of expiration was enough. The authors named it the mere urgency effect, and they wrote that people "behave as if pursuing an urgent task has its own appeal, independent of its objective consequence." The flagged email beats the manuscript on the same terms.

The same pull can serve Quadrant 2. The Eisenhower Matrix, as usually taught, gives important work without urgency an end date, and the strongest end dates carry a consequence the world enforces. Dickens had one. A Christmas book has to be in the shops before Christmas, and no clause in any contract could move the twenty-fifth of December. The Carol was important from its first page, and the calendar made it urgent as well, so it crossed into Quadrant 1 on a schedule Dickens set when he picked the subject. A creative can pick the same kind of date: a reading already booked, a festival deadline, an exhibition slot, a release date announced to a mailing list.

The accounts arrived in February. "Such a night as I have passed!" Dickens wrote to Forster on the tenth. "The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230! ... I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear." His year's bills, unpaid, were "so terrific," and he talked of letting the house for the season. The monthly Chuzzlewit numbers kept coming until July.

The Carol has never been out of print. Forster kept the walks. In his pages Dickens still goes out after all sober folks have gone to bed and walks fifteen and twenty miles of black London streets toward a date nobody can move.