What is the Eisenhower Matrix and why Notion
Alright, so before diving deep into how to actually use an Eisenhower Matrix inside Notion, here’s what this thing actually is. The Eisenhower Matrix is the simplest way I’ve found to stop endlessly shifting around tasks without making progress. It splits your to-dos into four quadrants:
1. **Do it now** (urgent and important)
2. **Schedule it** (important but not urgent)
3. **Delegate it** (urgent but not important)
4. **Delete it** (not urgent, not important)
I first stuck this into Notion kind of on a whim. I already had a million things set up there — work tasks, food delivery receipts, weird cat gifs I thought I’d use in a blog — and figured “why not” add a matrix. But I didn’t use a template. I built it from scratch so that I could customize it each week. 😅
Here’s why Notion works really well for it:
– You see the weekly layout in one page instead of digging through 16 different tools.
– You can drag things between quadrants as priorities change (because they *will*, like when someone drops a mystery meeting on your calendar).
– You can filter based on tags like #clientwork or #personal, depending on what meltdown you’re navigating each week.
So if you’re the kind of person juggling Slack messages, personal errands, random AI test scripts, and trying to remember who you owe coffee money to… Notion can take all of that and tame it with one view.
Create the four quadrants in a Notion database
To build mine, I didn’t use Kanban. I tested that, but honestly, boards just got messy and required too much horizontal scrolling on my tiny laptop. I went with a Table view tied to a Select dropdown for priority — which matched each quadrant.
Here’s what to do:
1. Make a new **Database Table**. Call it Weekly Task Matrix or something uninspired like I did.
2. Add a **property** called Priority. Set the type to Select.
3. Add four options:
– Urgent and Important
– Important not Urgent
– Urgent not Important
– Not Urgent not Important
Then, make four filtered views off this table:
– Each view should only show tasks with one of the above Priority values.
– Set the Sort inside each to Due Date or Created Date, depending on how you’re feeling about time.
– Turn off properties you don’t need in that view — sometimes I only keep Task Title and Status.
If that sounds like work, well, it was. But it was one Sunday evening and now I reuse the same database every week.
One weird moment — occasionally, Notion will lose the order of your filters across sessions. So one Monday morning I opened the view and everything had shuffled into different quadrants. I thought my week had collapsed. It hadn’t. It was Notion being strange again. 😛
Use templates inside your Matrix for weekly resets
Now the real magic happened the moment I remembered Notion templates are a thing. I made a **Weekly Reset** button inside the database that pre-fills all four quadrants with common categories.
Here’s how:
1. Click New Template inside your database.
2. Add 4-5 new rows:
– “Check client deliverables” → Urgent and Important
– “Schedule team sync” → Important not Urgent
– “Respond to flagged emails” → Urgent not Important
– “Reorganize Zapier folders (lol)” → Not Urgent not Important
3. Make sure the Priority Select is set for each.
4. Rename the template to “Weekly Reset.”
Every Monday I just hit that button and instantly have a new board of placeholders to work from.
Things to watch out for:
– If you already have old tasks from previous weeks, they might still be in your default view. You can avoid that by adding a Week tag or setting a Created Date filter that only shows items from this week.
– Don’t over-template. One week I had like 20 prefilled items and stared at them for 30 minutes before doing nothing. Keep it minimal.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Turn this into a recurring weekly task habit
I always forget to review the matrix unless I bake it into a habit. So I created two tasks:
– Monday @ 9am → Press the Weekly Reset template
– Friday @ 5pm → Review what I didn’t do and question my life choices
These reminders sit in my main to-do tracker, but here’s the secret trick:
Link your Eisenhower Matrix to your calendar or Slack or wherever you’ll actually see it. I had a recurring Google Calendar event titled “Prioritize or Panic” that just said: “Review Eisenhower matrix — check if anything needs moving.” It sounds silly, but it worked.
You can also add status columns in your table like To Do / In Progress / Blocked. That way you can tease out what’s just sitting there pretending to be work.
The emotional part? When I first started doing this weekly, I realized most of my energy went into things that weren’t even important. Facepalm moment. Like, I moved 5 tasks from Urgent/Not Important to Delete entirely and literally nothing bad happened.
Use formulas to dynamically shift priority
Okay, this is where it got kind of nerdy. I added a Formula column to *automatically* move tasks between quadrants based on due date and importance.
Let’s say:
– Task has an Importance flag (a Checkbox you manually mark)
– Task has a Due Date set
Here’s the formula I used in the Priority Formula column:
“`
if(and(prop(“Importance”), dateBetween(prop(“Due Date”), now(), dateAdd(now(), 1, “days”))), “Urgent and Important”, if(prop(“Importance”), “Important not Urgent”, if(dateBetween(prop(“Due Date”), now(), dateAdd(now(), 1, “days”)), “Urgent not Important”, “Not Urgent not Important”)))
“`
Now the Priority column auto-updates based on the date and importance settings. I kept the manual Select column too, just in case the formula decides to implode (which it’s done twice 😒).
Every time I auto-filled a week with this formula logic, I found things I *thought* were urgent were actually assignable later. Helped calm the panic a bit.
Restore old versions when things break randomly
There was a week when my matrix … disappeared. It wasn’t entirely gone, but the filters were removed and several of my entries had been moved to the wrong weeks. I blame past me for editing without locking views.
Here’s how I fixed it:
– Go to the top-right••• of the database → choose **Page History**.
– Restore to a previous version from 2 days ago.
What saved my butt that week was the fact I had duplicated the database the Thursday before. So now every Friday, I duplicate the entire page and archive the old version.
It’s not elegant — I wish Notion had versioning snapshots like a git repo. But at least this approach means I can go back if I totally bork the formulas again.
Also: if you have other team members editing this database, consider locking the filters or making views Read-Only. If someone accidentally renames your Priority labels to something like “Low Key Critical,” it can break filters across the board. Ask me how I know.
Build a sidebar shortcut you’ll actually click
No matter how fancy your matrix is, if you don’t *look* at it daily, it’s pointless. What worked for me was pinning it in the sidebar inside a dedicated Weekly Ops space.
Inside Notion:
1. Create a new top-level page called Weekly Dashboard
2. Drop the Eisenhower Matrix database inside it as a linked view
3. Add a text block above it titled “This week’s mission” or something that guilt-trips you into updating
4. Pin it to the sidebar by clicking ••• → “Add to Favorites”
Now every time I open Notion for something silly like grabbing a headshot or checking on an API token, I still see this matrix.
If you’re even lazier (like me on Wednesdays), make it your Notion home tab. That way, the first thing you see when you open Notion isn’t a backlog of projects, it’s a colorful reality check of what’s been sitting untouched all week.
🙂
Hook it up to automation without chaos
I tried linking the Matrix database to Zapier to auto-create Monday items. It… kind of worked. And by that I mean it worked once, then duplicated tasks four times without reason.
What did work was using Make.com’s Notion connection that checks for a status column = “Planned” OR empty, then creates a new item from a template block.
Here’s the thing though:
– Make’s Notion module sometimes errors out if the property types don’t match exactly
– If you change the database schema mid-week, any existing automations will fail silently
– One time, Notion didn’t register the API update until like 6 minutes later. So yeah, test carefully.
Later I simplified — I just added a checkbox called “Auto” and had the automation ignore anything unchecked. Less disasters that way.
That said, I wouldn’t automate updates to Priority without strict conditions. The moment a bot touches that Select field and puts something in the wrong quadrant during your busiest day, it’s chaos.
Prompt yourself into better decisions using callouts
Tiny trick but it really changed how I interact with the matrix:
Above every quadrant view on the page, I added a Notion callout that asks a reflective question:
– For Do it now: “What’s truly urgent TODAY?”
– For Schedule it: “What’s important later but needs thought?”
– For Delegate: “Who can own this besides me?”
– For Delete: “Why is this even here?”
And yeah, sometimes I ignore them. But other times they make me delete things I would’ve kept just to avoid disappointing fake accountability demons. Instead, I manually move the task to Archive and reward myself with a snack. 🙃