How to use the Eisenhower Matrix and WSJF to Prioritize Jobs
What Value Do These Tools Have?
For the past 4 years, I’ve used the Eisenhower Matrix and Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to help me prioritize jobs based on urgency, importance, and value. These tools offer consistent results on their own, but when combined, they refine jobs to another level of clarity.
These tools guide me in two main ways:
- Categorizing unimportant and non-urgent jobs, which I drop.
- Scoring the remaining jobs based on relative, increasing economic value.
By following this process, I get quick answers to which jobs should be worked now, which ones to schedule, and which ones to hand off to someone else to do.
What Is the Eisenhower Matrix?
An Overview
The Eisenhower Matrix is a 4-quadrant chart that has two axes: Importance and Urgency.
Each quadrant represents a category of action that I can take.
- Do - Important and urgent
- Delay - Important and not urgent (I prefer to use the term Schedule)
- Delegate - Not important but urgent
- Drop - Not important and not urgent
For example, if I place a job in the top-left, meaning that it is both important and urgent, then I should work on that job now.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
|---|---|---|
| Important |
Fix leaking sink Take child to doctor Get new driver’s license |
Cut grass Go grocery shopping Build this website |
| Not Important |
Fill out survey at work Get more drawing pens Change email address on account |
Beat that hard video game Shop for a bigger mouse p Watch latest updates on YouTube |
The Matrix in Reality
This is great when the jobs are small and there aren’t that many; however, what tends to happen with me is one or two of the quadrants get heavily weighted with a number of jobs. For me, the quadrants that get heavily weighted are the Schedule and Do ones.
I have noticed that Delegate is highly dependent on which context of life I’m in. At home, I tend to Do more and often Delegate less, while at work I tend to Delegate and Schedule more than I Do because I’m often pulled aside to fight technical fires or answer a lot of contextual questions for which I had no plan.
Drop has been a humbling reality check for me. Early on I would have a few things fall into this category, but as I’ve gotten more experience with the matrix, I often never put anything in here because I’ve already culled these jobs from my mental list before I even get to the process. You will get to this point too the more you use this tool.
Using the Matrix in Table Form
When I have a lot of jobs, I transform this matrix into a table and mentally ask myself the importance/urgency questions for each jobs and choose the appropriate action. This is a lot easier to manage and re-sort when using a tool like a spreadsheet. I’ll show this later below.
While this is great, I still tend to have a lot of items in the Do quadrant. How do I pick on what thing to Do first? This is where WSJF comes in.
What Is Weighted Shortest Job First?
This tool is a way to prioritize a backlog of “Do“ work. It does this by calculating something called the Cost of Delay (COD) which is the economic value of a job over time and dividing that by the size or effort required to complete a job, which will give you the weighted economic value of a job:
COD = VALUE + TIME + RRIO
WSJF = COD / SIZE
Calculating all these parameters for each job gives us a WSJF score. We can sort these by highest to lowest. The items with the highest values are the ones to work on first. Note that the TIME value here is not the size of the job, but it’s sensitivity or criticality.
The COD is the sum of 3 values:
- The user or business value (How much does the stakeholder value this job?)
- The time sensitivity value (How much will I lose if I do this later than sooner?)
- The risk reduction or increased opportunity value (How much will this make things better in the long run?)
Each value is scored using a relative numbering system based on the Fibonacci sequence.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...For our use, we throw away the first two numbers and start with 1 being the numeric equivalent of the thing with least value.
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...Anything that we deem has the least value is scored as a 1. For values of 2, we point things if they are double the size of 1. We do this for each successive value in the sequence according to our relative value that started at 1. This not only gets applied to the values used to calculate each element of the COD, but it also used to point the job’s size (or effort).
Is this a good way to value the priority of jobs?
This may all seem like hocus pocus, but because everything is pointed on a relative scale it can be relied on for two reasons:
- It is consistent because it is relative to a baseline.
- It shows you what you value in an economic way.
This is enough to get started on your most important and urgent jobs. When working with other people, you can quickly hand-off the highest priority jobs to be delegated. For scheduled jobs, you can put them on a calendar in order of priority as well.
How to Combine These Tools
The quickest way to start working with these tools is to use a spreadsheet. Any will do, but I like to use Google Sheets because it’s very convenient and shareable. For this exercise, I’ll show you a few of my jobs under my “Infrastructure” plans for my website and how I fill out the sheet.
1. Build a Spreadsheet
Designate a single sheet for a single context
This context can be your home, some aspect at work, etc. It just needs to be loosely related by your location and periods of time so you can keep those jobs together. This can be hard if you don’t have clean boundaries between contexts, but I think that’s OK. Life can be messy. Do the best you can.
Lay out your columns
Here’s my list of columns from left to right:
| Job | Status | Eisenhower | WSJF | Value | Time | RRIO | COD | Size |
|---|
I’ve also added Status here to help me keep track of what is Todo, Active, or Done. We’ll add our first job to the next row.
2. Categorize with Eisenhower
Think about why before how
I’ve determined that I need to add a blog to my website. In my mind, it is Important and Urgent so this gets marked as Do because I don’t have anyway to develop my ideas in public so that I can answer the why and how questions that stream into my mind. This gives me a place to point people to when they ask “Why did you do that?”
Add a job a row at a time
Think about everything you want do to do. Add it. Categorize it.
| Job | Status | Eisenhower | WSJF | Value | Time | RRIO | COD | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add blog | Todo | Do | ||||||
| Add funnel for guides | Todo | Schedule | ||||||
| Add funnel for poly post | Todo | Schedule | ||||||
| Add funnel for plan tool | Todo | Schedule | ||||||
| Add funnel for tada | Todo | Schedule | ||||||
| Setup openobserve | Todo | Schedule | ||||||
| Manage infra via TADA | Todo | Schedule |
This is a good start and now you can point things relative to their lowest values on the sequence.
3. Point Then Sort by WSJF Score
Look for the thing with the least value and point it first
The job with the least user or business value should be given a 1. The same should be for the thing with the least time sensitivity and risk reduction. Every higher valued thing should be measured with that baseline.
Ask yourself: Is this the same or more valuable than the previous pointed thing?
Add your formulas and fill down
For the COD of first job, add this in your spreadsheet (assumes Job is column A):
SUM(E2:G2)Then fill down the spreadsheet with the formula. Next, for the WSJF of the first job, add this:
H2/I2Review the sheet
Finally, ask if the WSJF scores fall in line with your values?
| Job | Status | Eisenhower | WSJF | Value | Time | RRIO | COD | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add blog | Todo | Do | 15.50 | 5 | 5 | 21 | 31 | 2 |
| Add funnel for guides | Todo | Schedule | 2.40 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 12 | 5 |
| Add funnel for poly post | Todo | Schedule | 1.60 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 8 | 5 |
| Add funnel for plan tool | Todo | Schedule | 1.40 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 7 | 5 |
| Add funnel for tada | Todo | Schedule | 1.20 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 5 |
| Setup openobserve | Todo | Schedule | 0.77 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 10 | 13 |
| Manage infra via TADA | Todo | Schedule | 0.24 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 21 |
Choose Your Work and Begin
Some jobs will have the same WSJF score and you’ll be left wondering if which to choose. Just pick one unless you are in a huge ethical dilemma or your conscious leads you otherwise. The point is just to get started on the highest value things. It’s not perfect.
FAQ
What Do I Do if My Priorities Change?
Re-point and re-sort. Maybe add a new status called “Paused” to your spreadsheet.
Is One Job Equal to One Task?
I would say no.
If we are talking about the agile world, a job should be an epic or maybe even a story if it’s small enough. I would then add every significant step that can be completed by a single person or pair of persons to be a “task”.
The unit of work is going to be highly subjective to you and your teams, but I have found that a single job is usually comprised of multiple tasks.
What Do I Do If I Don’t Know My Values?
Go for a long walk. The kind of walk that makes you start thinking about what you really want.
Where Do These Tools Fall Short?
- Neither of these tools show how tasks depend on each other.
- Neither of these tools can give you real estimates of time.
- Neither of these tools classify or group tasks outside of their urgency, importance, and value.