In “First Things First”, the follow-up to Steven Covey’s best-selling self-improvement and motivation book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, he illustrates a highly effective system of time management that can benefit anybody. Covey’s Quadrant method of time management has been adopted throughout the business world: in team-building, project management, business meetings, leadership trainings, and seminars.
What Covey has named his Quadrants system is based on the theory that most of us are driven by a consuming sense of urgency. He instructs us to divide all our priorities into the following four quadrants:
Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent – Items in this category are integral to your life and require your immediate attention. This includes: situations such as crises, emergencies, appointments, projects that have deadlines, and other pressing problems.
Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent – Items in this category are integral to your life but don’t require your immediate attention right now. This includes: activities like planning and preparing, spending time with loved ones, building and developing relationships with others, considering new possibilities and opportunities, fun and creative pursuits.
Quadrant 3: Not Important but Urgent – Items in this category are not integral to your life, but they do require your immediate attention. This includes anything that appears pressing on the surface (ie returning a phone call), but doesn’t have any drastic consequences or repercussions on your life.
Quadrant 4: Not Important and Not Urgent – Items in this category are not integral to your life and don’t need to happen at any particular time (or at all, for that matter), yet doing them consumes your time and energy. This includes distractions and diversions, addictions, obsessions, and compulsions, mind-numbing time-wasters, and other things you can generally do very well without.
What Covey says about these Quadrants next may surprise you. He warns that the common tendency is for people to get wrapped up in Quadrant 1 & 3 tasks because of their sense of urgency, at the expense of Quadrant 2, which contains many life-enriching acts.
The focus on tasks in Quadrants 1 and 3 are bolstered by the influence of other people and forces outside yourself, including the impetus of time. Accomplishing tasks in Quadrants 1 & 3 give us a comforting sense of progress. Tasks in Quadrant 4, then, are what we do to anesthetize ourselves to the stressful effects of an imbalanced concentration of your energy on urgent matters. We often hide in Quadrant 2 tasks, and use them to procrastinate doing something else.
Quadrant 2 is where our true and lasting happiness resides. It is also the category likely to be the most deficient in items listed there. To get your creative juices flowing, in addition to the possibilities listed above, Quadrant 2 also includes: reading and expanding the mind; developing new skills and abilities, getting physical exercise, engaging in recreation and leisurely activities, devising and implementing systems, preventative care, envisioning your future.
Giving attention to Quadrant 2 activities will make us more readily able to tackle Quadrant 1 and 3 tasks with ease and efficiency.
