Eisenhower priority classifier
A task that is both urgent and important, such as fixing a production outage, lands in quadrant 1: do it first. Answer two yes-or-no questions and get schedule, delegate or delete for the other three cases. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Task
- Fix production outage
- Quadrant
- 1
- Action
- do
- Action label
- Do first
The Eisenhower matrix is the classic urgency-importance grid used by managers, founders, and personal productivity systems to decide what deserves attention next. Optional task labels are echoed so dashboards and chatbots can keep human-readable names next to the quadrant.
Two questions, four boxes
The Eisenhower matrix sorts every commitment along two axes. Urgency asks whether the item presses for time: a hard deadline, a live incident or a promise that collapses if delayed. Importance asks whether it advances goals, values, relationships or long-term outcomes that still matter when the calendar is calm. Crossing the two answers gives four quadrants with fixed actions. Urgent and important is quadrant one: do it now, as with fixing a production outage. Important but not urgent is quadrant two: schedule it. Urgent but not important is quadrant three: delegate or batch it. Neither is quadrant four: delete it or park it on purpose.
When to use it and the usual mistakes
Teams use it to turn urgent and important checkboxes on tickets into do, schedule, delegate and delete labels for boards and weekly reviews; assistants route inbox items into calendar blocks or delegation queues; trainers grade matrix drills. The most common mistake is treating everything urgent as important, which lets status pings and other people's priorities crowd out strategy, prevention and skill building. Another is expecting the tool to judge urgency for you: it does not read the task description, so the two answers must come from you or your own scoring.
How the Eisenhower matrix maps urgency and importance to four actions
The Eisenhower matrix, named after the prioritization habit popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and later by time-management literature, separates every commitment along two axes. Urgency asks whether the item presses for time: a hard deadline, a live incident, or a commitment that collapses if delayed.
Importance asks whether the item advances goals, values, relationships, or long-term outcomes that still matter when the calendar is calm. Crossing the axes yields four quadrants with fixed coaching actions.
Where this priority check helps day to day
Product and engineering teams wire urgency and importance checkboxes on tickets and need a single source of truth that maps those checkboxes to do, schedule, delegate, and delete labels in bots, boards, and weekly review emails. Executive assistants and chief-of-staff tools score inbox items with two toggles and must route them into calendar blocks, delegation queues, or trash without reimplementing the matrix in every client. Coaching platforms and PMP-style training sites need a deterministic oracle for exam drills and interactive widgets that already teach the four quadrants by name.
Failed validation does not consume balance.
What you can do with it
Ticket and backlog triage
Map urgent and important flags from issue trackers into do, schedule, delegate, or delete labels for boards and weekly review digests.
Training and coaching drills
Grade Eisenhower matrix exercises with a deterministic oracle for all four urgency-importance combinations.
FAQ
How does the Eisenhower priority classifier choose do, schedule, delegate, or delete?
Urgent+important → do; not urgent+important → schedule; urgent+not important → delegate; neither → delete.
What is the difference between urgent and important?
Urgent means time-sensitive (deadline or crisis). Important means the work advances goals or long-term outcomes. The matrix uses both axes independently.
What belongs in quadrant two?
Work that is important but not urgent, such as strategy, prevention, skill building and relationship work that compounds over time. The action is schedule, meaning you block calendar time before it turns into a fire.
What should I do with urgent tasks that are not important?
They fall in quadrant three, the home of interruptions, status pings and other people's priorities. The action is to delegate or batch them, so the time pressure does not steal your deep work.
Does the tool decide whether a task is urgent?
No. You answer the two questions yourself, or bring the answers from a form or your own scoring; the label you give the task is only shown back next to the result.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eisenhower-classify \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"urgent":true,"important":true}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eisenhower-classify", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"urgent": true,
"important": true
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eisenhower-classify",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"urgent": true,
"important": true
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eisenhower-classify", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"urgent":true,"important":true}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"urgent":true,"important":true}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eisenhower-classify", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"urgent": true,
"important": true
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "biz.eisenhower_classify",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
This Eisenhower priority classifier takes two boolean flags—whether a task is urgent and whether it is important—and returns the matching action: do first, schedule deep work, delegate interruptions, or delete busywork. The same pure analytic path powers the free browser tool and the paid API, so coaching apps, standup bots, and portfolio tools never disagree on which of the four boxes a ticket belongs in when urgency and importance are already known.
How the Eisenhower matrix maps urgency and importance to four actions
Quadrant one is urgent and important: crises, compliance deadlines, and work that both matters and cannot wait—the action is do, meaning act now or protect focus until it is finished. Quadrant two is not urgent but important: strategy, prevention, skill building, and relationship work that compounds—the action is schedule, meaning block calendar time before the work becomes a fire. Quadrant three is urgent but not important: many interruptions, status pings, and other people’s priorities that demand speed without moving your goals—the action is delegate or batch so the time pressure does not steal deep work. Quadrant four is neither urgent nor important: low-value busywork, idle browsing, and optional noise—the action is delete or consciously park so it stops competing for attention. This capability does not invent urgency or importance from free text; it assumes those flags are already decided by a human, form, or upstream scorer, then applies the deterministic four-way map so every client sees the same action codes.
Input contract, response fields, and validation rules
Example: urgent true and important true yields quadrant one, action do, and Do first. urgent false and important true yields schedule. urgent true and important false yields delegate. both false yields delete. POST a JSON body with two required boolean flags. urgent (aliases urgency, is_urgent, time_sensitive) is true when the task is time-sensitive. important (aliases importance, is_important, goal_aligned) is true when the task advances meaningful outcomes. Both fields accept JSON booleans, the numbers zero and one, or the strings true, false, yes, no, y, n, one, and zero (case-insensitive). Missing fields, empty strings, and other types fail with invalid_input naming the field and are not billed. Optional task (aliases label, name, title) is a short string up to five hundred characters; when present and non-empty after trim it is echoed on success so UIs can show the original wording next to the action. On success the body returns urgent and important as normalized booleans, quadrant as one through four matching the classic layout (one do, two schedule, three delegate, four delete), action as the machine code do, schedule, delegate, or delete, action_label as a short English phrase such as Do first or Schedule, interpretation as a one-sentence coaching gloss, and formula restating the four-branch rule. The endpoint does not score free-text priority, estimate hours, or reorder a backlog of many items; call it once per item when flags are known.
Where an Eisenhower priority API earns its keep
Personal productivity apps and Notion-style templates call a tiny parse endpoint so browser free tools and automation webhooks stay byte-aligned on the same pure module.
Integration use cases
Inbox and assistant routing
Turn two boolean scores on messages into calendar blocks, delegation queues, or delete candidates for chief-of-staff workflows.
Technical questions
Can I send only free text and have the API invent the flags?
No. This capability classifies from flags you already set. It does not score unstructured text or call an LLM.
What boolean formats are accepted?
JSON true/false, 1/0, and the strings true, false, yes, no, y, n, 1, and 0 (case-insensitive). Other values fail with invalid_input.
What does the Eisenhower priority classifier cost?
The browser tool is free. API requests use prepaid KIT balance at $0.002 per successful call; invalid input is not billed.