How You Can Use Your Time Most Effectively
How are you spending your time? Do you feel you are using it as effectively as possible? Are you achieving your life goals? Or are you stuck in a rut? Understanding the principles of time management as explained in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” will help you to maximise your use of your time.
The Four Quadrants of Time Management
Stephen Covey talks about the four quadrants of time management.
It may help you understand the powerful ideas behind Stephen Covey’s concept if pick up a pen and piece of paper and sketch out a square divided into 4 quadrants. Write importance on the left of the square and urgency underneath.
As we go through the 4 quadrants, write a description of the activities in your life that fit into each quadrant in the squares.
Starting with the greatest time waster:
Quadrant 4 (bottom right) This is the quadrant of not important and not urgent activities, many of your favourite time wasters and diversions can be found here: trivial tasks, “busy” work, inconsequential phone calls, television. It’s ok to spend some time here if it’s part of planned downtime – time when you’re refreshing yourself.
Quadrant 3 (bottom left) This is the quadrant of not important but urgent activities. You’ll find things like phone calls from people demanding answers, interruptions from colleagues, short term urgent stuff and fixing minor problems around the home. Ask yourself “If I don’t do xxx, what would be the consequence?” In many cases the main result would be that you save time for something more useful!
Note: sometimes you end up spending time here because you’ve let things get out of hand and now it needs urgent attention.
Quadrant 1 (top left). This is the quadrant of important and urgent activities. This is the quadrant of flying by your pants crisis management, deadline driven project and fire fighting. Everyone ends up spending some time time here, it’s just that some spend more than others.
In fact you may be like many people who get a real buzz out of operating here. You could end up choosing to spend a lot of time in quadrant 1. I know, I’ve been there!
The downside of this quadrant is that after a while you end up going round in endless circles going nowhere – the same crises just keep re-occurring. The stress keeps growing and you’re at great risk of burning yourself out. This is not a good place to operate in the long term!
Quadrant 2 (top right). This is the quadrant of important and not urgent activities. The stuff that you really need to do but always gets pushed aside by the quadrant 1 and 3 activities. Examples are: planning, preventing quadrant 2 and 3 crises, building relationships, looking for new opportunities, purposeful recreation (remember those quadrant 4 activities – they can be turned into something valuable!).
You are a smart reader and you have probably guessed that the key to success espoused by “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is that you should focus on spending as much time as possible in Quadrant 2.
If you are successful in spending a significant part of your time on the long range planning and prevention activities in quadrant 2 you will prevent the quadrant 1 and 3 crises from eating up your life in ineffective activities. You will also be moving towards your life goals.
Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People teaches us that we should spend as much of our time as possible in important non-urgent activities such as planning, avoiding future crises, building relationships and looking for new opportunities and ideas. How are you spending your time?
Do you want to find out more about the 7 habits of highly effective people ?
