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About this tool
Sort tasks into the four urgent/important quadrants from two 1-10 scores, and see how many hours go to firefighting versus planned work.
The Eisenhower Matrix Tool sorts a task list into four quadrants by testing two 1-10 scores against a single threshold: important means importance is at or above the threshold, urgent means urgency is. That gives Do now (urgent and important), Schedule (important, not urgent), Delegate (urgent, not important) and Drop (neither) — the grid Stephen Covey drew from Eisenhower's 1954 remark that the urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. It is for anyone whose to-do list has stopped telling them what to work on next, and it adds an hours column so you can see how much of the week is going to firefighting.
Open Eisenhower Matrix Tool on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Type each task title with Importance (1-10), Urgency (1-10) and Estimated hours, using Add task for more rows.
Set the High-score threshold, 6 by default, so any score at or above it counts as important or urgent.
Read the Do now, Schedule, Delegate and Drop quadrants, the share of planned hours in Q2, and the Every task, sorted table.
Quadrants come from one explicit threshold test on both axes, so the sort is reproducible.
Weights each quadrant by estimated hours, which is what actually competes for your week.
Move the threshold to change what counts as important or urgent without re-scoring every task.
Q1 urgent and important (do it now), Q2 important but not urgent (schedule it), Q3 urgent but not important (delegate it) and Q4 neither (drop it). Q2 is the quadrant that gets squeezed out, and it is the one that prevents future Q1 emergencies.
This tool defaults to 6 on a 1-10 scale, so a task scoring 6 or more on an axis counts as high. Scoring 6 for importance and 6 for urgency lands in Q1; 5.9 and 5.9 lands in Q4, which is why the threshold is adjustable rather than fixed.
The tool's convention is that a task due today or already overdue scores 10, a task due at or beyond the 14-day planning horizon scores 1, and everything in between is linear — so seven days out scores 5.5. You can override any derived score by typing your own.
They are the same four-quadrant grid. Eisenhower supplied the urgent-versus-important distinction; Covey popularised it as a 2x2 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and named quadrant two as the one to protect.