Eisenhower Helps to Prioritize and Get Things Done [iOS]

A couple week ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Eisenpower, a productivity app for Mac that lets you manage your tasks by priority. Eisenpower uses the Eisenhower Matrix to help you get things done more efficiently. Today I get to review Eisenhower, which is a similar app for the iPhone that also utilizes the Eisenhower Matrix.

Eisenhower helps you to prioritize your tasks by urgency and importance. It then goes a step further and helps you to focus on what really needs to be done, by limiting the amount of tasks that you can add. Plus, it includes a special timer that you can use to help you focus on a single task for just 30 minutes.

Here’s a closer look at Eisenhower for iPhone.

Getting Started

After installing and opening Eisenhower on your iPhone (or other iOS device), you can immediately start adding tasks. There are four different “sheets” to add tasks to:

1. Do First – For tasks that are urgent and important
2. Schedule – For tasks that are less urgent, but important
3. Delegate – For tasks that are urgent, but less important
4. Don’t Do – For tasks that are neither urgent nor important

Tapping on a number (at the bottom of the app) will let you switch sheets as needed. Just tap in the text area above the sheets to add tasks to the sheet selected. Remember, you can only add up to 8 tasks per sheet – that’s a total of 32 tasks for all sheets.

Focus Mode

If there’s a really urgent and important task that you want to focus on, you can use the special built-in timer to help you with that. It will force you to work on just one task for 30 minutes. You can even enable a ticking sound for the timer if you’d like.

To do this, just click on the little clock icon next to the task that you’ve entered and a timer button will pop up. Once you click on the play button, the timer will start. You can also stop the timer or fast forward to the end if needed.

Even though this may not force you to stop what you’re doing on your computer, laptop, anywhere else, at least you won’t be able to do anything on your iPhone (or any other iOS device you may be using).

Note: This feature only works on the Do First sheet (number 1).

Scheduling and Emailing

If there’s a less urgent, but important task that you want to add to your calendar so you don’t forget it, you can do that as well.

Just click on the calendar icon next to the task and give Eisenhower permission to access your calendar. Then you’ll be able to add an event to your calendar. For the event you can add invitees, create an alert, choose the calendar you want to add it to, set your availability and even add notes.

Note: This feature only works on the Schedule sheet (number 2).

For urgent, but less important tasks, you can email them to yourself or someone else. Just click on the arrow next to the task to bring up a new email message that will ask the recipient to take over the task for you. This is really great for delegating smaller tasks so that you can focus on larger and/or more important tasks.

Note: This feature only works on the Delegate sheet (number 3).

Managing Your Tasks

Eisenhower also has a couple of cool features to help you manage your tasks and sheets.  For instance, you can tap and hold anywhere on a task to make it movable. This means that you can move your tasks around to better organize them.

You can even use this feature to move a task from one sheet to another – just drag it down to the sheet number that you want to move it to.

To mark a task as done, drag your finger across it as if you’re crossing something out on a piece of paper. This will cross off the task and then you can click the “x” that will appear next to it, if you want to totally delete it. If you’ve changed your mind, just drag your finger in the opposite direction to undo the cross-out.

Final Thoughts

Eisenhower syncs in the cloud so that you can pick up where you’ve left off, should you choose to use the Web client. You’ll need to create an account, or you can simply use your Facebook account to sign in.

If you’re wondering, there are not any actions (i.e. timer, schedule, delegate) that you can take for tasks in the Don’t Do sheet (number 4). I’m sure that this is due to the fact that these tasks are not urgent or important and can be done any day/time that you choose.

There’s no doubt about it, Eisenhower is definitely a useful productivity app for iOS. There’s so many great features and the fact that you can handle each set of tasks differently, is really impressive. My only complaint is that the app is not universal (not optimized for the iPad), so I have to use the iPhone version on my iPad 2. Hopefully, an iPad or universal version will be coming soon.

What are your thoughts on Eisenhower? Are you using this app or a similar app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad?