Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich

We were taught to manage our time, but in the AI era, time management is dead. The new goal is managing context and intelligence.

I’ve loved the Eisenhower matrix for years. As part of my overall 48 Hours Philosophy (more on that in the coming book), I’ve always been focused on doing the things that matter most. The tools have never been more amazing in the history of mankind, and, if you remain strategic, vigilant and focused, there is very little you can’t accomplish.

By combining the classic Eisenhower Matrix with AI tools, you can 100X your productivity. Here’s how you do it.

📘 What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

The classic Eisenhower Matrix helps you prioritize effectively, both individually and as a team. It focused on quadrants divided by Urgency and Importance, which classically land in four camps:

👉 Do
👉 Decide
👉 Delegate
👉 Delete

The goal of the Eisenhower matrix is to spend most of your time doing the most important things that hopefully are not urgent, minimizing what is urgent (because you’re prioritized and planned so well previously), and delegating tasks that you don’t actually need to complete yourself.

You put your time‑critical, high‑priority tasks, like major deadlines or a crisis, in the "Do" quadrant; this is the stuff that either bad things happen if you don’t do them right away, or you have to do them for strategic business reasons.

The real goal is to get to the "Decide" quadrant. These tasks aren’t on fire, they’re the most impactful long‑term, and you also don’t need to be in full fight‑or‑flight mode to be effective here.

The bottom half of the matrix is for tasks with little strategic value. They are necessary evils in your productivity matrix. Delegate urgent but less critical items, and delete distractions (another part of the 48 Hours Philosophy, more to come on that.)

🤖 Eisenhower Matrix, Meet AI

Let’s do this differently now. A little more “use your tools,” a little more “100X yourself.”

Try doing this instead of randomly playing with AI tools today. (Dabbling won’t get you there anyways. I’ll explain later.)

By combining this matrix with what we can do with AI, we come up with this:

🗑️ Delete (Bottom Right)

Use AI to identify things that are low‑impact.
Set up automations to stop doing those things or clean out the gunk.
Have your best AI friend screen your inbox and only bring you what matters most, automatically getting rid of other things.

🤝 Delegate (Bottom Left)

Automate anything that has repeatable steps.
If you aren’t comfortable doing that yet, figure it out and get comfortable.
If you haven’t built your first bot, go ahead and do that.
Use your built‑in AI tools in whatever universe you use.
If you use AI tools outside of your primary productivity tool set, integrate them.

🧠 Decide & Deep Work (Top Left)

Make AI your collaborator.
Create Agents that can do multi‑step, complex things for you.
Preferably put those on a separate machine if possible so that you can continue your other productivity without technical constraints.
Offload research.
Create a bot that has a ton of context on what you’re doing in its knowledge base so that it can be your creative thought partner.

⚡ Do & Augment (Top Right)

This is where your daily ballet happens. Those tools (that you set up during your Decide and Deep Work time) will now flit around your computer with you, assisting you like an excellent Chief of Staff or intern.

🎯 But who actually DOES this?

Good news — we do! This is exactly how we set up our business at Newstate U.

You’re no longer an individual contributor or a leader. You are the choreographer, the director — you set the vision, determine the deadlines, think through every layer of your orchestration.

A couple of examples:

• You can use both native AI and AI through plugins to literally build automated workflows for you in your CRM just by describing it and providing it with pre‑created context and screenshots.

• You can use an add‑on to build your reports (while you’re doing other things), so that you can come back to the data solution.

• You can give your AI friend a list of individuals you’d like to outreach to, or first have the friend propose outreach contacts.

• Give that AI friend access to whatever LLM you’re using as your knowledge base, and have them craft email outreach that utilizes whatever information you want to communicate, along with customized messaging based on the individual and research on them.

• You can even ask it to match tone based on public interviews with that individual, or previous emails where they have responded directly to you.

Is it perfect? No.
Is there a first mover advantage for your career if YOU are the person to master this first? Yes.