How to Use The Eisenhower Matrix in the ClickUp Hierarchy (Beginner Tutorial)

It feels like every single week there's a new software or gadget or gizmo or productivity hack that we should be checking out if we really want to be a more productive worker. But sometimes I feel like the most productive paths are the simplest ones. And in this video I want to dedicate our focus, I suppose, to one of the most simple frameworks and tried and true frameworks for productivity that you have probably already seen. That is the Eisenhower matrix. This is one of those frameworks that has just stuck around even as software has come and go. And because it is so beautifully simple, it's something that we can apply in just about any software we choose to use, or even a piece of paper if that's our preferred system. Doesn't matter, it'll still work. In this video, I'm going to show you how we can take the Eisenhower matrix and apply it inside the task management tool ClickUp in case this would be a helpful way for you to organize your work while keeping things super simple. But first, let's just do a quick recap of what the heck the Eisenhower matrix is. Yeah, okay. I feel like the best and most iconic way to summarize the Eisenhower matrix is to look at these four. Decide, do, delete, and delegate. These four quadrants are formed based on answers to two questions or two variables. In this case, we've got the Y axis of importance. How important is something? If it's very important, it'll go up. If it's not so important, it's going to go down. That is one direction that will determine whether you're in the decide and do section or the delegate and delete section. But that's only halves, right? We need quadrants, so that's where the X axis comes in. We need to answer, how urgent is this given task? Well, I hate to say it, but right now in my life, maybe reading that book is not so urgent. Given the Y axis and the X axis are answers to both of those, we'll be able to establish where should any given task go on our to do list. So if we had a pile of tasks, we just run them through the same criteria. How important is it? How urgent is it? Okay, do this. Not important. Not urgent. Okay, maybe don't do this. What this matrix is doing is allowing us to take a giant pile of hundreds of tasks and just kind of filter out the noise to focus on what we actually need to do in a given moment, day, week, year. Particularly because things like importance and urgence are. Urgence, urgency. Things like importance and urgency they're going to change over time. What is urgent today may not be urgent a year from now, but. But that's okay. This is all relative to your productivity, and that's why this is an effective tool for helping us sort down what we actually need to focus on. But that's Eisenhower ing in a nutshell. How do we actually build this in ClickUp? Well, option number one is actually exactly what I just showed you. ClickUp now has a whiteboard view that could allow us to throw all of our tasks into a whiteboard view, such as this one here that I'm working on currently, and sort these onto our list. However, despite how great this whiteboard view can be, the whiteboard view in ClickUp is still quite basic, and loading that information in there, it can be a little bit time consuming. So despite this being a valid path forward for organizing our Eisenhower ing in ClickUp, I'm actually going to show you another method that's right alongside it to show you how we might start to organize this in ClickUp. This is going to be using one singular list I'm calling the Layla Eisenhower list. Yeah, still not good at naming things. But what this list involves is using filters to focus down our task list based on what quadrant a given task falls in. Every task in our journey is going to start on our unsorted view. This is basically where we're going to put any task where we have not yet established how. How important it is and how urgent it is. Now, anyone who's newer to ClickUp might be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. She just. Okay, dog. Okay, Norman, do you want to come in the video? We're going to go in the video. Say hi to Norman. He's really loving this. Yeah. Really enjoying himself here. What we've got going on here is two dropdown custom fields, and the first one is importance, and importance is where we're going to decide whether something is important or not important. The next one is urgency, where we'll establish what is urgent and not urgent. These are dropdown fields that you're going to create by going over to the plus sign, clicking on dropdown, and creating a new field. Now. Yes, Norman, in case you're wondering. Okay, okay. This isn't going. He's got to go down. Goodbye. So in case you're wondering, yes, these dropdown custom fields are going to utilize your custom field allotment. If you're on the free plan of ClickUp, you are limited if you're on the free plan. So sorry, you get what you pay for. But for the rest of you on paid plans. You won't have to worry about that. But what we're going to do is create our field and add our values of important, not important, and repeat this for each of the fields. Now, clearly, I already have this one in here. Fine, but that's what we're going to want to do for each task. Now, this is where every task begins. And we could quickly brain dump tasks here. Here. Like adopt a dog. Sorry, Norman. We could buy more coffee. It could be whatever it is that we need to do. We could dump all these potential tasks right here. We could also, if we're feeling fancy, use ClickUp's mobile app, or use a form view and ClickUp to create tasks on the go. It doesn't matter which method you do, but to start this eisenhowering process, we need to have a solid brain dump phase. So brain dump away, get all your tasks in here, then we're ready to look at those other views. Ready. Okay, so once we have all of our ideas in here, we want to rank them just like we did on that virtual whiteboard. First thing we're going to answer is importance. How important is buying a phone? Not important. How urgent is buying a phone? Definitely not urgent. All right, there we go. All of a sudden, you noticed how that task just disappeared. Did you see it? If not, we're going to do another one. Okay, adopt a dog importance. Considering I already have two, it's not very important. And urgency. Not urgent. Yeah, I don't think I need a third dog right now. Okay, so that task also disappeared. This is where you might be wondering, what the heck is happening? Why is this unsorted view having tasks just disappear? Am I moving things? No. You'll notice over here it still says there are 10 tasks on this list. I'm not moving anything. I'm not deleting anything. But. But what is happening almost instantaneously is my filter is applying. So in ClickUp, our filters allow us to hide things out of view, just tuck them away, just in a certain view. This guy up here, as the symbol might warn you, this is a view. It's showing us a perspective of what is on this list. On this particular view, I have a setting set up that only shows me tasks where one of these pieces of information is missing. That's why it's called the unsorted view. So as soon as I sort both of these things, I fill in data for both of these, then that unsorted view will say, nope, this doesn't qualify anymore. In fact, if I get rid of all these filters. You'll notice that all of my tasks are visible. But that's not very helpful because I want this to just be the unsorted view. So that's why the unsorted view has those two filters to only show me ones where the importance and urgency are not set. In other words, I haven't yet categorized this task. Does that make sense? I hope so. I know it's a little confusing, the whole views thing, but just leave it to say it's just cutting things down and hiding things when I'm clicking on this particular view. What happens next, though? What about all these other things I have over here, these colors? I'm going to zoom out just one so you can see them all together. What do you do with these other things? Well, if this is where we sort things, these other views are where we actually take action, because the Eisenhower matrix. Right, Eisenhowering. We sort and then we take action. Well, the first view we have here is called the do view. And I'm going to show you how this works. And I think pretty quickly you're going to grasp how all of these work. In this DO view, you'll see we have two tasks, and these both have custom fields visible. Both are important and both are urgent. And on this view, we also see that there are tasks hidden. Again, there's a filter in place on this view. What is that filter? Well, it's only showing me tasks where the importance dropdown field is important and the urgency dropdown field is urgent. Okay, so it's like the opposite of the unsorted area. We're only focused in on one where both of these things and not or both of these are true. And that's what's showing us our do list. That's what's showing us our do quadrant. It doesn't matter whether we hide these custom fields from view or not. It's still showing us that same information on this DO view. Next up, we have the Decide view. The decide view is very similar, except in this case we're filtering for different things because we are looking at a different quadrant. Here we are filtering to only show tasks where importance is important. That's the same, but urgency is not urgent. That's what puts us in that decide quadrant. And this view, by filtering out all the other things and only showing us stuff with these custom fields, is showing us only items in the decide area. So if I go inside this task, you'll notice that the importance is important and the urgency is not urgent. Again, it doesn't matter whether the custom fields are showing. I could have them show or not show. But what matters is that's what the values are and that's what determines what shows up in this view. I think by now you know where I'm going next. Delete what happens in the delete view? Same kind of thing, except we're filtered to only show not urgent and not important. That's it. So in this view we are only seeing the tasks that really should be deleted. Next up, delegate the delegate view. Same kind of thing, except with different filters in place to show us not important and urgent. Ha. That is it. That is our very, very, very simple Eisenhowering list and ClickUp. It's utilizing two custom fields which you would want to add to every single task on this list. Is this the only way to do things in ClickUp? Absolutely not. But is this the simplest way if you wanted to start using the Eisenhower matrix in ClickUp? I think so. I can't think of a much simpler approach that we could possibly have here. So if you're someone who's looking to get started in ClickUp, one list is really all you need to bring in your eisenhowering practice and into ClickUp easily and be able to focus in on what you really need to do on a given day. And if you're looking to get started with this today, one thing I'd suggest is taking whatever view it is that you like the most, which will probably be the doing view, and adding that to your favorites so you can easily find it in the future. This will add it into your favorite section, which you can even pin to the top of your screen if you'd like to. That's my last little pro tip for you. But of course this is just one framework in one task management tool. This is really just the beginning. If you're interested in building out more frameworks inside of ClickUp or the Eisenhower matrix inside of other tools, I'd love to hear that in the comments area below. Ooh, and if you are a member of our Process Driven membership, this template that I just showed you, this list for the Eisenhowering process. This will be available inside the membership well long before you see this video here. So thanks so much for watching guys. Hope to see you in the comments and until next time, enjoy the process.