Pretty much anyone, regardless of what they do and where they’re at in life, can undergo this simple auditing process. Having clarified your priorities, you could plan your day, week, and so on in accordance with those priorities, and learn to say ‘no’ to anything that was going to be too much of a distraction, and take up too much time, money, and energy, to really be worth it. Once you got clear on what you really needed to do to run your life and succeed with what you were doing, everything would be a lot simpler. The other main things you would need to do would be things that are involved in doing those three things, such as driving to university and driving to work (or catching the bus or whatever), and chores, errands, and self-care type activities that pretty much everyone needs to do, such as eating, sleeping, doing laundry, buying groceries, exercising, and so on. The main things you would need to do would be: Let’s say, for example, you’re a student studying at university, and you have a part-time job so you can pay your bills.
One simple way to apply the idea of the four quadrants is to figure out and clearly list what the main things you really need to do are. Then, you can take care of the important things, and be more productive, happier, less stressed, and more relaxed. It’s also useful to figure out what you might be doing that’s seemingly urgent, but isn’t really important and valuable, and stop doing those things.Īnd, obviously, it’s very useful, in terms of productivity and time management (and just in terms of life in general), to figure out how you might be wasting your time doing things that are neither urgent nor important, and find ways to stop doing those things, or reduce the amount of time you spend on them. So the more time we spend in the second quadrant, doing important, high-yield things like planning and structuring our day, week, and year, and getting actual work done, the fewer fires we’ll have to put out.Įventually, after we’ve been making an effort to manage our time better and spend more time in the second quadrant, we won’t have that many first quadrant tasks coming up, because we’ll have been taking care of what needs to be taken care of, planning and being organised, anticipating possible future problems and thinking of contingency plans, and so on.
When we first start trying to put this into practice, we might have to spend a significant amount of time in the first quadrant as well – fighting (metaphorical) fires that we need to put out.īut Covey points out that lots of emergencies and crises come from our poor time management and lack of strategic planning in the first place. That way, we use our time as effectively and efficiently as possible. These are time-sinks, like watching TV, playing video games, wasting time on the internet, and so on, and other activities that you might habitually do, but that, when you really think about it, are essentially a waste of time.Ĭovey says that we should aim to spend as much of our time as possible in the second quadrant: doing things that aren’t urgent, but that are important and high-yield. In the fourth and last quadrant, we have things that are neither urgent nor important.
In the third quadrant, we have things that are urgent, but aren’t actually important: things like people bothering you with requests, asking you to do low-yield activities, and things that seem pressing for one reason or another, but that, when you really thing about, don’t yield anything of significance, or don’t really have significant consequences. In the second quadrant, we have things that don’t need to be done really quickly or right away, but that are important and high-yield. These are things like crises that you urgently have to manage, problems that are out of control, fires that have to be put out (metaphorically speaking, but literally as well I suppose), and tasks that you have to work on really quickly because they’ve mounted up and gotten out of hand. In the first quadrant, we have things that are both urgent and important. Things that are neither urgent nor important. Things that are urgent, but not important, andĤ. Things that are important, but not urgentģ.
Things that are both urgent and importantĢ. (Which I think is a great book, and I recommend it.)Ĭovey says that you can sort tasks and activities into four categories:ġ. It’s something I learned from Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I wanted to tell you, briefly, about the four quadrants of time management.
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