Introducing the Today-Week-Month method
An alternative to Eisenhower’s matrix
So much to do, so little time.
Fix the leaking pipe. Reply to the WhatsApp message you just received. Update your LinkedIn profile to attract business, jobs, opportunities. Declutter the junk drawer of loose batteries, washers, coins, and paperclips. Write a will. Organize your important documents and make sure they’re up to date, including your passport! Resolve an escalating client complaint. Watch that new documentary you heard someone talk about at work. Call your finance director – they need a decision from you right now. Submit the funding bid whose deadline is this evening. Explore some new music playlists. Schedule a health check-up. Call your elderly relative to wish her a happy birthday today. Learn how to make better use of a Large Language Model. Take your child to the doctor. Attend a last-minute meeting. Learn Spanish. Try the new sourdough recipe you bookmarked. Agree and share a monthly domestic budget with those you live with. Respond to some DMs on Instagram. Prepare for tomorrow's client presentation. Help a colleague find the file they’re asking you about. Organize your photo albums. Update your reading list. Play Scrabble with your son. Answer a customer service call – Confirm delivery details for a recent purchase. Answer a non-critical email – respond to a vendor inquiry about standard services. Learn how to fold fitted sheets. Pay an overdue bill to avoid additional late fees.
Just reading through even a made-up to-do list induces stress. All the tasks above sound pretty important. They all sound pretty urgent. And we all live a version of this life — dozens of things we feel we should be doing at any given moment. This is the overwhelm that so many of us experience and complain of. This is modernity for the world’s most privileged human beings.
How should we deal with all these disparate calls on our time?
For me and many, timeboxing will play a part. But how do we get from a long, overwhelming list to nice, neat, structured calendar entries?
One of the best-known methods is Eisenhower’s urgent-important matrix:
The matrix is intended to help us prioritise and process tasks to give us, for each one, a single, specific action. This is often simplified to (going around clockwise, from the top-left):
Defer
Do
Delegate
Delete
Already, there are several problems with this method.
First, it’s not all that easy to decide on the importance or the urgency of a task. How do we calibrate? What’s the scale? I met someone at a talk I gave last year who asked me how to distinguish urgency from importance in a way that’s helpful. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the prospect of assigning an urgency and importance level to each of a long list of items will be an onerous task itself!
Second, even if you can motivate yourself to do it, it’s still a substantial piece of work to do.
Third, suppose you’ve got the Eisenhower grid filled out—you’ve assigned each of your tasks to a quadrant. I’ve done that here for the 29 tasks at the start of this post:
Now what? You’re still staring at a lot, even in the top-right.
The glibly-touted D-words are not actually all that unhelpful. Defer for how long? Which do you do first? What if delegation just isn’t an option? Are you certain you want to permanently delete all the bottom-left items?
Before I propose a practical solution to this mess, let’s consider a couple of other characteristics of urgency and importance.
Urgency is loud!
If a task is truly urgent, it will get done. Your boss will hassle you for it. The unread message remains marked unread. The unreturned email stays in your inbox. You’ll simply remember it because it feels urgent and you’re affected by that urgency. Rightly or wrongly and very often wrongly, the squeaky door gets the oil.
We don’t need to worry all that much about the bottom half of the table. Furthermore, most urgent items come with a *Best Before* date — a deadline, a birthday, an event in the calendar, the naturally low tolerance we have for leak-related property damage.
Urgency is often an illusion
When talking to people about timeboxing, one of the most common objections is that when plans change, the timeboxes become invalidated with cascading invalidating effect. But when we dig into this some more, the situation they’re really describing is that they become aware of some emails or messages suddenly, and feel the need to respond to them right away, at the expense of the task they said they’d be doing now.
Emails and messages are rarely urgent. But they feel urgent because they’ve just arrived. They’re breaking news! But that is a costly illusion. They are not urgent. And the best way to resist the illusion is not to see it in the first place. When I ask why they even saw that email in the first place, the answer tends to be that they saw a notification and just couldn’t resist a peek. The dopaminogenic force of a new message (which could be anything) is well documented and well understood. So think about how you become aware of new messages (a count symbol in the browser, an alert on your laptop, a vibration from your phone) and shield yourself for the time you don't intend to be working on them. This will help you stay focused on the task in hand, both when you are, indeed, supposed to be working through your messages and, more importantly, for the many more hours when you are not.
The tragedy of the important-but-not-urgent task (bottom-right quadrant)
The tragedy of the important-but-not-urgent task is its quiet, persistent neglect. By definition, these tasks lack the piercing immediacy that demands action. They sit patiently on the fringes of our to-do lists. It’s at those ineffective fringes that much of life’s meaning slips through our fingers.
A life that aligns with our values, nurtures our health, builds lasting relationships and acquires new skills is a life full of intention, meaning and purpose. Yet for so many of us, especially as we’re all permanently tethered to the time-sapping devices in our pockets, they rarely see the doing-light of day. Through perpetual deferral, we dilute the purpose we might enjoy, and cheat ourselves of the richness life could offer.
When in doubt, fill more of your time with the MR ELF activities: meditation reading, exercise, learning, friends & family.
And remember that a life of intention is a life without regret.
A proposal
I propose a simplifying improvement to the Eisenhower matrix.
Let’s do away with the two separate axes. Instead, just use these four urgency categories:
Today
This week
This month
Never
This is much more specific. We know what we mean by each of these concrete terms.
And so you run through your to-do list, classifying each item with one of the four labels above. Be realistic about each one, not overstating (or understating) its urgency. Note: very few items should properly be labelled ‘Today’. For example:
Fix the leaking pipe. TODAY
Reply to the WhatsApp message you just received. THIS WEEK
Update your LinkedIn profile to attract business, jobs, opportunities. THIS MONTH
Declutter the junk drawer of loose batteries, washers, coins, and paperclips. NEVER
Write a will. THIS MONTH
Organize your important documents and make sure they’re up to date, including your passport! THIS MONTH
Resolve an escalating client complaint. THIS WEEK
This method has the benefits of running along a single dimension (urgency) while giving the important-but-not-urgent items a look-in (generally to be labelled with This week or This month). We’re also able to apppropriately deal with the neither-important-nor-urgent items by labelling them Never ie removing them from our list.
It’s efficient, effective, and liberating to run through your list in a spreadsheet. Put the task in column A. Make one of the four classifications alongside, in column B. When you’ve got to the end of the list, sort the items on column B.
Best of all, it’s clear what to do when you’ve labelled all the items. You timebox them according to the classification. All the today items get a timebox today. This week items, this week. This month’s will be timeboxed in the next month. So this method dovetails beautifully, seamlessly with timeboxing, which is of course a winning endgame.
***
The feeling of overwhelm is unpleasant and impacts us all. Mental models can help us deal with it. I believe this Today-Week-Month model trumps even Eisenhower’s famous matrix. I just made it up, in the writing of this blog so you’re the first to hear about it. Please let me know how it works for you by replying to this email or in the Substack Comments.
Marc
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Good stuff - I do immediately think of the tasks I’ll need to do in the next few months, but not this month. And then at a certain point, this starts to sound like giving everything an approximate start or due date which isn’t quite a framework but is probably a good idea.