I'm engaging in a thought exercise, with very prosaic items to put in the matrix.
- Cat food: If you're out of cat food, important and urgent.
- Cat food: If you're not out of cat food, important and not urgent.
Here, I would say that this can provide some visibility into items that can be prevented from becoming urgent. It could spawn a project about not running out of urgent household supplies. Maybe that project would include clearing off some shelves in the garage as a place to store modest stockpiles, and creating monthly ticklers for checking the supply levels. That project isn't urgent, but it's important, in the sense of avoiding future urgency.
Now, there are a thousand OTHER ways to get to, and act on, the idea of, "Rushing out for emergency supplies is a waste of time," but if the Eisenhower Matrix got you there, cool.
- Choosing and buying a pair of those folding travel dress shoes: Not important, not urgent.
- Choosing and buying a new pair of walking shoes: Important and urgent.
I just want the folding shoes so that my luggage is a tiny bit less bulky and heavy. And because they seem like a fun idea. Meh.
But my walking shoes were wearing out and hurting my feet, and so I wasn't walking places and wasn't getting that incidental exercise. And if I get out of the walking habit, it's hard to get myself back into it.
I had a day off Friday. I didn't want to "go shopping", but I recognized the importance of that second item--as a result of this discussion! And I went and got a new pair of walking shoes. Half an hour. I begrudged the half hour doing something I didn't wanna do on my day off, but it was well worth it. If those shoes had just been buried on a "clothes I'd like to have list" including, for example, the folding travel shoes, I wouldn't have them today.
- More perennial flowers to brighten up the vegetable garden: Important and not urgent.
- Planting another bed of beans in the vegetable garden: Important and urgent.
Now, this rests on preexisting "importance" decisions. I've already decided that the vegetable garden is important. I already know that there's a level of "pretty" that I need to keep me motivated to work on the garden, and I discovered this year that, no, I just won't tend annual flowers. So the flowers are important, but I'm not going to flee the garden today if they aren't planted, and in fact they're not going to pay off much, possibly at all, this year. I can plant them any time between now and November for pretty much the same end result next spring. (In fact, waiting for the rainy season might mean a better result.)
But snap beans from the garden are very important to us, and we're running out the clock on planting more beds to keep the succession going. So I want to get them planted before Sunday. This involves several tasks, because the next bean beds aren't prepped. So all the tasks to get them prepped--lifting the volunteer potato plant and hopefully keeping the potatoes in an edible condition, weeding, forking, perhaps composting--are "urgent and important" because they're aimed at an urgent and important goal. Without that consciousness, I might amble around the garden weeding and prepping other things.
There are, of course, levels of important. All of these (well, maybe except for the cat food when you're out) might be shoved off the table by something more important and more urgent. But I still think it's a worthwhile thought exercise.
