Can Your To-Do List Become a Spiritual Practice?
Most of us who have work experience in professional contexts are familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix. The framework was popularized by Stephen Covey and draws from the habits of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and encourages users to divide tasks into four quadrants based on two questions: 1. is this task urgent? 2. is this task important? What results is a simple grid that equips leaders with information that guides their decision-making process.
The Eisenhower Matrix is productivity tool. But underneath the productivity logic is a question that is, at its core, profoundly spiritual.
What is important to you - and why?
The Urgency Trap Is a Spiritual Problem
Eisenhower observed that what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important. Most executives know this is true. Most executives also spend the majority of their days in the urgent quadrant anyway - putting out fires, answering the loudest voice in the room, greasing the squeakiest wheels - mistaking motion for meaning.
This is not just a time management failure. It is a formation failure. The person who is perpetually reactive - always available, always responding, always in crisis mode - is being formed by their calendar rather than their convictions.
Over time, urgency becomes identity. Busyness becomes virtue. And the things that actually matter - relationships, reflection, integrity, discipleship - get deferred indefinitely into a quadrant that never seems to top the priority list.
The Eisenhower Matrix, used wisely and intentionally, can be a tool for interrupting that formation.
Redrawing the Quadrants With Different Ink
The standard matrix asks what is urgent and important to your organization. The spiritual practice version asks a prior question: important to whom?
Before sorting a single task, sit with a few questions:
What does faithfulness look like in this season of my life?
What would I want to have prioritized, looking back from the end?
What is God asking of me that my calendar currently has no room for?
The answers to these questions tend to reveal truths about your calendar and your current priority mix.
Now, sort your tasks. But this time, let your values set the definition of importance, not your inbox.
Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important: These are genuine crises and real deadlines. Respond. But notice how many items you reflexively place here that, on reflection, belong somewhere else.
Quadrant 2: Important, Not Urgent: This is where spiritual formation lives. Prayer. Sabbath. Meaningful conversation. Mentoring. Strategic reflection. The relationships that don't demand your attention but desperately need it. Quadrant 2 is where the soul is sustained - and it is the quadrant most executives systematically neglect. Protect it on the calendar the way you protect a major meeting.
Quadrant 3: Urgent, Not Important: These are the tasks that feel significant because someone is waiting on them - but that, examined honestly, don't require you. Delegate them without guilt. The executive who cannot delegate Quadrant 3 has likely confused availability with faithfulness.
Quadrant 4: Not Urgent, Not Important: Eliminate these. This quadrant is where distraction lives - the scrolling, the low-stakes busywork, the avoidance strategies dressed up as productivity. A leader who is spiritually honest will recognize some of these as the places they hide when Quadrant 2 feels too confronting.
A Weekly Planning Practice
To get started using the Eisenhower Matrix as a spiritual practice, set aside fifteen minutes at the start of each week before the calendar fills, before the inbox sets your agenda. Write down everything competing for your attention. Sort it into the four quadrants. Then ask one additional question before you close the notebook:
Is there anything in Quadrant 2 that I have been deferring for more than a month?
If the answer is yes (and for most of us it will be) that item moves to the top of the week. Not because it is urgent. Because it is important. And because the person you are becoming is shaped, quietly and irreversibly, by what you choose to protect.
If you end up giving this practice a try, please drop a note and let us know! We love hearing about how leaders are integrating their tools into spiritual practices.
Christa Cordova is a corporate chaplain based in The Woodlands, TX, offering spiritual care for executives navigating the intersection of leadership and soul. Schedule a conversation.
