The four quadrants sort tasks with two different questions: “how much does it matter to the current goal?” and “does it need handling now?”. From those the tool builds four lists — important and urgent, important but not urgent, not important but urgent, and neither — while keeping effort, owner, dates and the reason for the classification. It does not score a person's efficiency, and it does not file rest, caregiving or relationship maintenance into a worthless column by default.

Changing the important or urgent flag in the edit area moves the card, and cards can also be dragged on the canvas to change those two flags. The export includes the graphic and a checkable list, and the JSON restores the document for further editing.

1. 01State this round's goal and the capacity available, for example “finish the course project within a week while keeping the fixed caregiving hours”. Deduct known commitments first, then write down the hours that can actually be scheduled.
2. 02Break large items into tasks with a checkable result. “Check the submission format and upload the draft” is easier to estimate and schedule than “finish the thesis”.
3. 03Judge importance and urgency separately and write down why. Urgency may come from a real deadline or merely from how loudly someone asked, and the two need to be told apart.
4. 04Fill in effort, owner and planned date. Important-but-not-urgent items especially need a concrete slot; anything you want someone else to do needs their agreement, not just a drag into a column.
5. 05Check whether the effort in the unfinished items exceeds capacity, and deal with the warnings about missing owners, dates or estimates. When capacity is short, change scope, deadline or resources rather than hiding the overload by reclassifying.
6. 06Export the quadrant PNG/SVG and the Markdown list, and save a JSON backup. Re-check next round against new information instead of freezing the classification forever.

This layout is often called the Eisenhower matrix. The distinction between importance and urgency in modern time management appears widely in First Things First by Stephen R. Covey with A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill, and in FranklinCovey's Time Matrix description. [1][2] A popular name is not the same as a definite claim of authorship over a particular interface or algorithm.

The two dimensions are independent: urgency answers when something needs handling, importance answers how much it affects goals, commitments and life values. Judging them separately keeps long-term preparation, prevention and learning from being pushed aside entirely by immediate requests. This is a framework for organising attention, not a psychometric scale; the tool does not infer from the wording whether a task is important.

Compared with an impact-versus-effort matrix, there is no comparison of expected benefit against implementation cost; compared with a calendar, it does not check for time conflicts; compared with MoSCoW, it does not define which requirements of a delivery are indispensable. Once the sorting is done, resources and dates still have to be arranged. Marking everything important and urgent only shows that goals and capacity are not yet reconciled; it does not create time.

A project delivery week might contain: fixing the problem that blocks submission today, scheduling a not-yet-due recovery test, coordinating a document tidy-up that a named colleague can do, and confirming whether a duplicate report with no clear purpose can be cancelled. The point is not to copy the classification but to write a concrete basis and a finished result for each item.

For instance, three unfinished tasks are estimated at 3, 4 and 2 hours against a capacity of 8 hours. The total, 3+4+2=9 hours, already exceeds capacity, and dragging cards between quadrants will not change that fact. Scope should be negotiated down, dates moved or resources added. This number only demonstrates the capacity check; it is not a general working-hours standard.

A second built-in scenario places exam preparation and family matters in the same round of planning, reminding the user to reserve existing life commitments. Caregiving should not be treated as unimportant merely because it has no work performance indicator.

• Up to 80 tasks.

• Classification, effort and completion status come from user input; the tool does not read a calendar, send reminders or accept a delegation on someone else's behalf.

• The capacity summary is an addition check, not resource scheduling or critical-path calculation.

• Parallel tasks, waiting time and switching cost have to be described separately.

• On a phone the edit area and the canvas use tabs while the export bar stays available; when dragging is awkward, the same change can be made by setting flags in the edit area.

• CSV is for viewing the selected data table; use JSON for a complete restore.

Treating “whoever is chasing hardest” as the only basis for urgency can hide the real deadlines; reading “not important but urgent” as permission to dump work on someone without a conversation ignores their capacity. A long-running project that is always written as one big task with no next step also tends to sit in important-but-not-urgent forever. When rest or recovery is needed, those arrangements should not be deleted to make the chart look efficient.

• Personal weekly planning, exam preparation, task screening before a project delivery, team capacity discussions and coordinating family matters all fit.
• Where several teams have sequencing dependencies, continuous shift patterns or resource conflicts, treat the quadrant output as input to further scheduling rather than as the finished schedule.

Sorting, drawing, saving and exporting happen locally in the browser with no account needed. Browser cleanup or storage limits can make the local draft unavailable, so back it up as JSON. A share link contains the task content and can be read by whoever receives it — it is not an encrypted collaboration space; remove personal information and confidential arrangements before sharing publicly.

[1] FranklinCovey: importance, urgency and the Time Matrix. This tool borrows the classification idea and does not adopt the page's neuroscience or effectiveness marketing wording as a promise. （访问日期：2026-09-22）

[2] Covey, Merrill and Merrill: publisher record and excerpt for First Things First. Discusses the gap between goals, relationships and actual time arrangements. （访问日期：2026-09-22）