Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.

Help me prepare and run the exercise below. First ask for my participant count, time, setting, access needs and intended result. Check these against the stated limits. Use the supplied rules and materials. Explain any proposed changes before using them, and label them as adaptations. Do not invent source claims or require personal disclosure. Give me one step at a time when I say start. I manage the people, physical activity and clock; do not claim to observe the room. Ask me what happened before choosing a next step.

Reference revision: c5949ed7db16b959990fef5de813f390c9924ad6dfb68d6980fa351c8520ba0d

# Merrill Covey Matrix

Participants write active tasks on sticky notes and map them onto a two-by-two grid of urgency and importance. Teams rank essential items, schedule long-term work, and discard low-value tasks.

**Time:** 60 minutes. Matches the 1-hour duration from the Gamestorming source; uses parallel small groups to accommodate up to 24 participants.
**People:** 4 to 24. Solo note generation, then working groups of 3 to 6 people on separate matrix boards, followed by brief whole-room reporting

## Choose this exercise

**Purpose:** Categorize and negotiate shared tasks by urgency and importance to create a prioritized action list.
**Use it when:** Use during project planning, workload resets, or sprint kickoffs when a team faces competing demands and crowded backlogs.
**Skip it when:** Skip when evaluating architectural decisions, multi-phase project roadmaps, or tasks whose basic scope is not yet defined.

## Materials and tools

- Sticky notes (standard 3x3 inch, 1 pad per person)
- Fine-tip felt markers (1 per person)
- Scratch paper (blank letter sheets, 1 per person for optional private notes)
- Whiteboard or flip chart paper pre-drawn with a 2x2 grid (1 per subgroup of 3 to 6)
- Smartphone or digital camera for capturing completed boards (1 per subgroup)

## Before participants arrive

1. Draw a large 2x2 grid on flip chart paper or whiteboard for each working group.
2. Label the columns: Left = Urgent, Right = Not Urgent.
3. Label the rows: Top = Important, Bottom = Not Important.
4. Highlight or frame the top-right quadrant (Important, Not Urgent) with yellow marker or tape to emphasize its strategic role.

## Say this to open

Welcome. We often get pulled toward tasks that shout loudest rather than work that drives our main goals. Today we will plot our active tasks on this matrix based on urgency and strategic importance. You will write your current work on notes, place them together, and decide what to tackle now, what to protect for later, and what to drop.

## How to run it

### 1. Write tasks (8 minutes)

Participants work silently and individually. Write active or upcoming tasks on sticky notes, one clear task per note. Aim for 3 to 5 tasks each. If you have personal tasks you prefer not to post on the team board, jot them on your scratch paper to keep for yourself.

### 2. Sort into quadrants (22 minutes)

Gather around your group's 2x2 matrix. Form subgroups of 3 to 6 people (for example, a room of 7 splits into groups of 3 and 4; a room of 13 splits into two groups of 4 and one group of 5). Members take turns reading one note aloud and proposing a quadrant. The group confirms or negotiates placement, taking about 30 seconds per note. For example, 'Fixing client login outage' goes in Top-Left (Urgent and Important), while 'Refactoring code for quarterly scale' goes in Top-Right (Not Urgent, Important).

### 3. Prioritize and prune (15 minutes)

Within your subgroup, arrange notes in the Top-Left quadrant vertically by execution order. Look at the Top-Right quadrant and agree on specific calendar blocks during the week to safeguard those tasks. For Bottom-Left (Urgent, Not Important), identify what can be delegated or streamlined. For Bottom-Right (Not Urgent, Not Important), peel the notes off and throw them away.

### 4. Assign owners and record (10 minutes)

For every remaining note in the top two quadrants, write a single owner's initials on the note. A designated subgroup member photographs the board using a smartphone or digital camera. If running multiple tables, have each group share one key task they chose to discard or protect (up to 4 groups, 1 minute each).

### 5. Debrief (5 minutes)

Facilitator leads a short whole-room reflection using the debrief questions. Invite 2 or 3 brief comments from volunteers across the room to close the session.


## Debrief questions

- Which quadrant held most of our tasks before we started this exercise?
- What is one important, non-urgent task that this team committed to protect this week?
- What low-value item did we agree to stop doing, delegate, or eliminate?

**Finished output:** A photographed, quadrant-mapped task board with assigned single owners for priority items and discarded non-essential tasks.

## Remote

Set up an online whiteboard with 2x2 grids for each breakout room, labeling axes with Urgent/Not Urgent horizontally and Important/Not Important vertically. Tint the top-right quadrant yellow. Participants generate digital notes during silent work. Breakout rooms of 3 to 6 sort, stack, and tag notes with owner names. The host brings all rooms back for final debrief.

## Hybrid

In-person and remote participants share a single digital whiteboard. Remote participants join room audio through a central conference speaker. In-person participants type notes on laptops or pair with an in-room scribe so all tasks appear on the same shared digital canvas in real time.

## Access and participation choices

- Participants may track personal administrative tasks privately on scratch paper and post only items relevant to the shared team board.
- Participants can ask a peer or facilitator to write and post notes on their behalf without stating a reason.
- Volunteers may pass on speaking during the final whole-room sharing.

## If the session gets stuck

**Participants place almost all tasks into the Urgent and Important quadrant.**

Ask the group: 'If you could only complete two tasks before the end of the week, which two would they be?' Force a strict vertical stack rank inside that quadrant.

**Subgroups get stuck debating whether a task is urgent or important.**

Remind them of the simple test: 'Urgent' means driven by an immediate external deadline or crisis; 'Important' directly advances strategic goals even if nobody is nagging you today.


## Terms used here

- 2x2 Matrix: A visual diagram formed by two perpendicular axes dividing space into four distinct planning categories.
- Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent, Important): Strategic, forward-looking work such as planning, skill building, and system maintenance that prevents future crises but lacks an immediate deadline.

## Sources and adaptation

Observed in Gamestorming, which attributes the underlying concept to Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill's book First Things First.

Retained the Gamestorming procedure, four-quadrant definitions, and 60-minute duration. Adjusted subgroup sizes to 3 to 6 to handle any cohort from 4 to 24 without leaving isolates. Capped note generation to 3 to 5 notes per person so sorting comfortably fits the 22-minute round. Added explicit use of scratch paper for private work and linked the camera material directly to Step 4.

[Gamestorming](https://gamestorming.com/merrill-covey-matrix)

[Gamestorming](https://gamestorming.com/merrill-covey-matrix/)

Current run sheet: https://unitedwetransform.com/exercises/merrill-covey-matrix/