A popular concept in business management is the Eisenhower matrix. This ranks activities based on their relative urgency or importance. It is used to highlight a trap that many of us fall into – namely, responding to “urgent but not important” matters. We tend to jump on those things that cry for our immediate attention while neglecting much more valuable projects, or better uses of our time.
The idea comes from a speech delivered in 1954 by former US president Dwight D Eisenhower in which he quoted a university chief saying: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
While Eisenhower’s aphorism isn’t strictly true – sometimes important problems are also urgent, like rescuing a loved one from a burning building – he correctly highlights a human tendency to prioritise the wrong things. Inadvertently, moreover, Eisenhower diagnoses perhaps the greatest weakness of modern society. Important problems are almost never treated as urgent. And what’s urgent – the “hot takes”, the political theatre and the emotionally charged postings that light up your smartphone each day – are not important. Not in the great scheme of things.
“Today, we possess more information than ever before, and are less capable than ever before of predicting what will happen next,” writes Giuliano da Empoli in his book The Hour of the Predator.
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“Our ancestors lived in far more data-poor societies than ours, but they were able to make plans for themselves and their descendants. We have ever less understanding of the world in which we will wake up tomorrow morning.”
A key contributor to this is our fixation on the “urgent but not important”. We find it hard to raise our heads above immediate distractions to observe the journey we’ve taken so far, or to plot out the route ahead.
There are three factors that seem to be accelerating such short-term thinking. The first is technology. In an average working day, I have at least three email accounts, several Teams groups and multiple WhatsApp groups to respond to – and that’s before checking into social media. They can’t all be important, can they? Yet the dopamine release that comes from opening the latest alert is addictive. To hell with finishing an important piece of work, a new WhatsApp has landed!
The second driver of short-term thinking is capitalism. Corporations have never taken into account the long-term costs of economic activity – and nor are they expected to under free market conditions. Witness how artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being rushed out by Big Tech – with hopelessly inadequate guardrails – so investors can make a relatively quick buck.
Economists are fond of the saying “in the long-run we’re all dead”. Thanks to for-profit AI, the expected date of our collective demise is being brought forward.
The third driver of ephemeral reasoning is democracy itself. Electoral cycles come round at rapid pace. There is little incentive to make decisions for the long term, and politicians seem ever more conscious of this. Michael Healy-Rae lasted little over a year as a minister before he quit the Government. In the UK, Keir Starmer is not yet two years in Downing Street yet many within his party are trying to force him out. Why? Does anyone seriously think a change in Labour leader will affect government policy?
The person who probably best encapsulates this drive toward the “urgent but not important” is Donald Trump. The Leader of the Free World spews his unfiltered thoughts on social media without pause for spellchecking. He does business deals without consideration for history, law or social responsibility – so long as there is something in it for him. And he conducts politics in a constant state of now. Every day there is a new distraction, a fresh conspiracy theory to promote or a personal enemy to rail against.
It’s not that Trump is incapable of strategising. But, as political scientist Ivan Krastev puts it, “Trump ... cannot imagine anything longer than four weeks. Every time he uses timeframes, it is either something he is going to do in one day, two weeks or four weeks – he thinks in weeks. He is never going to say, ‘In two years we are going to do this,’ particularly when it comes to conflicts.”
This is radically different from authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping who think in generations or centuries, Krastev – an academic based in Sofia, Bulgaria – remarked in a recent episode of The Good Fight political podcast. The sad fact is American short-termism makes Russia and China look competent.
Trump is never going to change, but what about the rest of us? Well, for the sake of our democracy, not to mention our mental health, it would be prudent to apply the Eisenhower matrix to our lives and consider how much brain power we expend on the “urgent but not important”.
Tactical muting of one’s phone is a good start. As the American psychologist and philosopher William James puts it: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
