Eisenhower Matrix Example: A Founder's Week
An early-stage founder with too many demands and no time for the work that would reduce them.
This is a real-shaped week: a first quadrant full of things that were preventable, and a second quadrant full of the prevention that never got scheduled.
The useful move is not the sorting — it is what happens after. Every item in Schedule gets a calendar slot before the exercise ends, and every item in Delegate gets a name attached.
Do — Urgent & Important
- Payroll approval — deadline Thursday
- Production outage affecting three paying customers
- Sign the renewed office lease before it lapses
- Reply to the enterprise prospect who asked twice
- Fix the broken signup flow blocking all new trials
Schedule — Important, Not Urgent
- Write the incident runbook so outages stop needing me
- Hiring plan for the two roles we know we need
- Two hours of customer interviews weekly
- Document the onboarding process for the next hire
- Quarterly financial model review
- Actual rest — one full day off per week
Delegate — Urgent, Not Important
- Monthly investor update — template it, have ops draft it
- Routine customer support tickets — support hire, from Monday
- Scheduling all external meetings — assistant or booking link
- Vendor and subscription renewals — ops
- Weekly metrics pull — automate the report
Delete — Neither Urgent nor Important
- Weekly all-hands that produces no decisions
- Redesigning the pitch deck for the fourth time
- Competitor feature-tracking spreadsheet nobody reads
- Conference application from a category we no longer target
- Rewriting the About page copy
What this canvas reveals
- Three of the five Do items trace back to an unwritten runbook sitting in Schedule. Quadrant one is largely the interest payment on quadrant two.
- Investor updates are urgent every month and important once a quarter — templating them moves them permanently out of the top-left.
- The Delete column contains two things carried for four months. Their real cost was attention, not time.
Block by block
1Do — Urgent & Important
- Payroll approval — deadline Thursday
- Production outage affecting three paying customers
- Sign the renewed office lease before it lapses
- Reply to the enterprise prospect who asked twice
- Fix the broken signup flow blocking all new trials
2Schedule — Important, Not Urgent
- Write the incident runbook so outages stop needing me
- Hiring plan for the two roles we know we need
- Two hours of customer interviews weekly
- Document the onboarding process for the next hire
- Quarterly financial model review
- Actual rest — one full day off per week
3Delegate — Urgent, Not Important
- Monthly investor update — template it, have ops draft it
- Routine customer support tickets — support hire, from Monday
- Scheduling all external meetings — assistant or booking link
- Vendor and subscription renewals — ops
- Weekly metrics pull — automate the report
4Delete — Neither Urgent nor Important
- Weekly all-hands that produces no decisions
- Redesigning the pitch deck for the fourth time
- Competitor feature-tracking spreadsheet nobody reads
- Conference application from a category we no longer target
- Rewriting the About page copy