“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities” – Stephen Covey
Believe it or not, we are on the way to wrapping up the 1st half of 2021 and beginning to plan for the 2nd half of 2021. I am continuing the subject of maximizing our time – the only asset which cannot be reused or brought back.
I believe it is important to review the late Stephen Covey’s time management quadrant framework taken from his bestselling book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”
According to a recent research which measured productivity of 350,000 employees for all over the world, more than 40% of time is being spent on unimportant activities. From this analysis, essentially nearly half of life goes down the drain, especially if you are not intentional about how you spend your time!
According to Covey, each task can be sorted according to its urgency and importance:
Quadrant 1 – Urgent and Important – This covers unforeseen and pressing issues which include emergencies, and last minute obligations. To avoid serious consequences, you must deal with them immediately. Although some of these issues are unexpected, we can reduce the number of them by proper planning. An example for me today is to complete and submit my 1st PhD assignment due this Sunday. I have known about it for 1 month, yet I kept delaying having to dig in and take the required time to relearn how to write an academic paper..aargh. The effect of this late action prevents me from focusing on my Quadrant 2 activities for the rest of the weekend.
Quadrant 2 – Not Urgent yet Important – These are tasks of extraordinary productivity. They are important goals, strategic tasks and long-term projects and relationships. As they are not urgent tasks, you may keep postponing acting on these quadrant tasks. Ideally this is the quadrant where you spend most of your time: working on strategic-high impact tasks. They will bring more value to your life – and help you grow personally and professionally.
Quadrant 3 – Urgent but Not Important – These are tasks that cause you to be distracted from your key goals. They keep you constantly busy, but do not move you forward. They include activities like dealing with other people’s queries, incoming email, and calls (which you had not scheduled in advance) and minor issues. Of course, you cannot get away from these activities entirely. The objective is to be aware of them and try to reduce the time spent on them.
Quadrant 4 – Not Important and Not Urgent – These are tasks that are purely a waste of your time. They include distractive talks, time-killing activities. A small number of trivial activities like surfing social media platforms, and watching tv help us relax. However, if you are not careful, you could waste a lot of time in this quadrant and therefore losing the present moment.
As you begin to wrap up the first half of 2021, I encourage you to do an audit of how you spend your time in each of these activities. You can reflect and analyze what specific activities are in each of these quadrants as they relate to your life.
Question: What do you need to do to increase your Not Urgent Yet Important Activities in the 2nd Half of 2021 that will help create a bigger and better future for you?