Eisenhower matrix

Where the matrix comes from

On 19 August 1954, speaking to the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, President Eisenhower quoted “a former college president”: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The line was borrowed, and there was no grid. The two-by-two matrix with four actions was drawn later by time-management writers, and his name stuck to it (the speech, American Presidency Project).

The four boxes

• Do now (urgent and important): an outage, a deadline this week that a goal depends on.
• Schedule (important, not urgent): planning, hiring, fixing the cause of a recurring problem. This box is where most value is and where work goes to die if it never gets a date.
• Delegate (urgent, not important): requests with a deadline that someone else can answer as well as you.
• Drop (neither): say no, or close it.

The Eisenhower matrix in Jira

Most work items already carry both answers: the due date says how urgent it is and the priority how important. Pick “By due date and priority” above to see your rules at work, then use these filters on your own work (due within 3 days = urgent, High or Highest = important; change the numbers to your rules):

Do now

              assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory != Done AND duedate <= 3d AND priority in (Highest, High) ORDER BY duedate ASC
            

Schedule

              assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory != Done AND (duedate > 3d OR duedate is EMPTY) AND priority in (Highest, High) ORDER BY priority DESC
            

Delegate

              assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory != Done AND duedate <= 3d AND (priority not in (Highest, High) OR priority is EMPTY) ORDER BY duedate ASC
            

Drop

              assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory != Done AND (duedate > 3d OR duedate is EMPTY) AND (priority not in (Highest, High) OR priority is EMPTY) ORDER BY updated ASC
            

We ran all four on our own Jira Cloud site on 7 November 2026: every open work item assigned to us landed in exactly one box (2, 4, 1 and 7 of 14). The first version missed one, a work item with no priority: priority not in (Highest, High) skips items whose priority is empty, so the last two queries add OR priority is EMPTY.

duedate <= 3d includes overdue work; save each query as a filter and add four Filter results gadgets to a dashboard for a live matrix. How Jira counts a due date (the due day itself is never overdue) is in our Jira deadlines guide.

Two of our boards show one axis each:Priority Board puts a project in columns by priority, and Deadline Tracker by due date (Overdue, Today, 1–3 days and so on). Dragging a card changes the field in Jira. Neither shows the four boxes yet.