Smart Prioritization for Evolving Problems

How do you prioritize? You’re surely familiar with the Eisenhower matrix.

tl;dr Two axes: importance and urgency as criteria. If something is important and urgent, you do it right away. If it’s not important but urgent, you delegate it.

I’ve upgraded this approach, which works really well for security and risk management. I’ve added a 3rd criterion: the Trend.

So now we have:

• Urgency: How soon is it needed?
• Importance: What’s the impact?
• Trend: Is it getting better or worse as time goes by?

The Trend shows you if problems might fix themselves, stay neutral, or worsen over time.

For example, consider two problems:

• Problem 1: Medium importance, medium urgency, and negative trend (problem gets worse with time)
• Problem 2: Medium importance, medium urgency, and neutral trend (time doesn’t affect the problem in a meaningful way)

Using the standard Eisenhower matrix, you’d likely put them in the same basket with the same priority.

My upgraded method raises the priority of Problem 1 significantly because the trend shows it’s actively worsening.

This way you can resolve problems that aren’t urgent yet but will definitely become urgent if ignored. Guess what? Many cybersecurity issues are like that. And I often use this approach when helping my clients through WIM Security