We all have things that we want to get to… eventually. You tell all your friends that you’re gonna start that YouTube channel, launch a course, get back into running — but are you really?

There’s never time, you say! You spend most days putting out fires because your to do list is all urgent things that have to happen now.

Ideally, you’d love to be able to invest time into learning new skills, working on your Craft of the Month, or finally writing that book — but your plate is too full. Those projects aren’t the immediate priority, so they keep getting pushed to the side (and eventually off the cliff).

When everything feels like an emergency, you simply will not make time for something that doesn’t have consequences at all. Our brains are not wired for long term goals, they’re wired for survival.

This is why you procrastinate: doing new, unknown, or ambiguous things is often uncomfortable, and your body is trying to avoid anything uncomfortable. Remember — survival.

Instead, you turn everything into a priority and overload your to-do list as a way to avoid the discomfort of actually working on your idea. You may subconsciously be filling your time with other things so you can’t work on your idea. It’s much easier to say you don’t have time for something than to say I’m afraid to take the next step.

“Not having time” for something often looks like this:

You decide you’re going to launch a blog and block off time to start. When the time comes, suddenly it seems like it’s a good time to clear out that doom closet. Or maybe you blocked out 2 hours to write a first draft when you get home from work, but then your friend reaches out to get dinner tonight and suddenly you’re free. What blog?

Fast forward two years, and you’re still talking about starting that blog.

The Eisenhower Matrix is Out

Figuring out how to complete your daily obligations as well as make slow progress toward your bigger goals is hard. Ask your average Productivity Person™ how to prioritize and they’ll probably tell you about a tool called the Eisenhower Matrix designed to help you categorize tasks based on their urgency and importance.

Look familiar?

Despite it being a foundational tool for so many, we ultimately found the Eisenhower Matrix to be unrealistic and confusing for the average person.

When we tried using it in our real lives, we found that way too many items were getting dropped in the urgent “Do” category, the “Delegate” category wasn’t usually an option as a small team, and as multidisciplinary neurodivergent people, are we supposed to toss our creative whims in the “Delete” pile?

As much as we liked the theory behind it, it didn’t actually feel applicable to us.

After all, the matrix was designed by Eisenhower (we’re talking Dwight D., 34th POTUS) when he had an entire staff of employees to delegate to. No wonder it doesn’t work for us — we don’t have the same circumstances as a president, just like we don’t have the same 24 hours as Beyonce.

To make the tool more relevant for regular people, we decided to scrap the matrix, but retain the sentiment for which it was created: we all need help prioritizing the difference between urgent and important things.

Meet the Spacetime Prioritization Flow Chart

Instead of using the matrix, we designed a flow chart to help make prioritization decisions feel easier. Additionally, we renamed the four primary categories in a way that feels more actionable and less rigid. Here’s how we’re thinking about them now:

Dump it Out + BFFR

When using this decision tree, we recommend first doing a brain dump of all the tasks and ideas in your head right now. Grab a piece of paper (or note in your phone) and let it all come out. Try not to filter your thoughts in this step, because you want to grab every last thing bouncing around in your head.

Once you’ve done a brain dump, it’s time to use the flow chart. Run each individual item through the sequence of questions, starting with the one at the top.

The goal of the flow chart is to give you clarity on what’s important this week, not next week or next month.

If you’re someone who always feels like everything is the most important thing, the questions along the way are intended to prompt to you to BFFR (be f*cking for real).

When you don’t get real about the priority level, everything will end up feeling like one. This part might feel uncomfortable, but resist the urge to overshoot the importance or urgency of each task.

To avoid mislabeling the priority, use these clarifying questions to help you decide how to answer each question —

Now What?

Once you’ve identified which category all your tasks and ideas belong in, it’s time to get to work! Pressing and Core tasks are where you’ll put most of your energy when working through your to-do list, and your Back Burner is there when you’re ready for it.

It’s important to set realistic expectations of what’s possible. For additional help with this, check out our favorite tools — the Daily Focus Planner or our new weekly planning tool, Priority Planner.

When using these tools, time blocking is our scheduling strategy of choice — here’s a quick walkthrough of how we go about it.