Eisenhower Matrix with Long/Short Goal Oscillation
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ek uses the classic two-by-two — important/not important against urgent/not urgent — but adds the mechanism most people miss. His diagnosis: we're wired to deal with whatever is urgent, we're already good at procrastinating on the not-important-not-urgent quadrant, and the two we actually fail at are urgent-but-not-important and important-but-not-urgent. His fix is not better prioritisation in the moment but changing the time horizon you think in. Instead of reasoning in weeks and months, hold very long-term goals and very short-term goals simultaneously and oscillate between them — mentally hard, but it means far fewer things become urgent in the first place. For important-not-urgent work, build a forcing mechanism and schedule it.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Draw the two-by-two honestly
Map current commitments onto the grid: important/not important against urgent/not urgent. The point of the exercise is placement, not planning — most people misclassify urgency because it feels like importance.
- 2
Accept where you're already fine
Ek observes most people are pretty good at procrastinating on things that are neither important nor urgent. Don't spend energy building systems for the quadrant you naturally ignore.
- 3
Attack the urgent-but-not-important quadrant
This is one of the two quadrants Ek says we struggle with. Many things you think are urgent aren't that important, and his instruction is direct: you should be either delegating them or ultimately eliminating them.
Pro tip For each item ask who else could own it permanently, not just this once.
Watch out Doing these yourself feels productive, which is exactly why they survive.
- 4
Oscillate between very long and very short horizons
Ek's core mechanism: stop thinking in increments of weeks and months, and instead hold very long-term goals alongside very short-term goals, going back and forth between them. He concedes this is mentally hard for most people.
Pro tip Pair a decade-scale ambition with a this-week action and skip the mid-range planning that generates false urgency.
- 5
Build a forcing mechanism for important-not-urgent work
Because we're psychologically wired to serve urgency, important work with no deadline never gets done by intention alone. Ek's answer is to create a forcing mechanism where you actually schedule those types of things.
Pro tip Give it a fixed slot and another person who notices if you skip it.
- 6
Expect the volume of urgency to fall
The payoff Ek describes is structural: if you hold both horizons and oscillate, you're less likely to end up with a lot of urgent things. There should be very few genuinely urgent items in a well-run week.
Watch out As a leader, everyone else will still think everything is really urgent — you have to be very hard about this.
In the wild
Asked how he balances focus on one thing against Spotify's expansion from music into podcasts and then audiobooks, plus his separate healthcare venture, Ek said he had just given a talk on precisely that to his senior executives gathered in New York. His answer was the Eisenhower grid plus the oscillation mechanism: with everyone convinced their issue is urgent, a leader has to hold both very long-term and very short-term goals, delegate or eliminate the urgent-but-unimportant, and force important-not-urgent work into the schedule.
→ A shared prioritisation language for a leadership team running multiple simultaneous category expansions.
A founder maps a week onto the grid and finds nine of eleven recurring commitments are urgent but not important — supplier chases, inbox triage, approvals. He delegates six permanently and eliminates three. Then he replaces his quarterly planning ritual with two artefacts: a five-year statement of what the company should be, and a single action for this week. The mid-range plans that used to manufacture artificial deadlines disappear, and the weekly volume of genuinely urgent items drops sharply.
→ Nine recurring commitments removed and a standing weekly block for the important work that previously never happened.
Common mistakes
Treating urgency as a proxy for importance
Ek says we're wired to deal with whatever is urgent, and that many things you think are urgent aren't that important. Serving urgency feels like performance while the important-not-urgent quadrant quietly decays.
Planning only in weeks and months
The mid-range horizon is where false urgency is manufactured. Ek's mechanism requires holding a very long-term and a very short-term goal at once and oscillating, which is uncomfortable but reduces the urgent pile.
Relying on intention for non-urgent work
Without a forcing mechanism, important-but-not-urgent work loses every time to something with a deadline. It has to be scheduled as deliberately as a meeting with someone else.
From the transcript
“there's a framework called the Eisenhower Matrix um the basic gist is it's a 2 by two grid uh important not important urgent not urgent”
“if you don't think in increments of weeks and months but you keep a balance between very long-term goals and you keep a balance of…”
“the key is to then try to uh create a forcing mechanism where you actually schedule those types of things too”
From the episode
Spotify Founder: “Your Music Taste Could Signal The Books You NEED to Read” - Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek