When planning your time, after you’ve planned all urgent & important matters, you want to sprinkle in a mixture of both 2s & 3s. It’s important to create balance in your life, which you can do well, using this system. But do the rest fall exactly in line? (#2s, #3s and then #4s?) Well, not exactly.
Knowing that quadrant 1 items are top priority, you can probably guess that they really should be completed or planned first. I also really like how this forces me to triage my tasks before I add them to my list- I have to literally sit and evaluate each task before I write it down… to ensure I am placing it in the proper quadrant… no more doing #3s before all else! Note: I do combine this with a good “Brain Dump” to ensure all my thoughts are written down beforehand- that way I don’t forget anything while I’m prioritizing. I have a huge problem with over-planning my time, but using this method of priority really helps me get a handle on what I really do have time to accomplish. Often I find tasks that I think are important, but by forcing myself to place each task in a quadrant, I realize I can cut many of them out, simplifying my day. WHY THIS IS HELPFULįor me, it’s really nice to visually see my tasks organized by priority, especially when I start to feel overwhelmed with so many of them. Quadrant 4 is, you guessed it, lowest priority. They’re things that we need to plan a little time for (in the interest of self-care & unwinding), but need to keep under control. Things like watching our favorite show on Netflix, or surfing Facebook. Quadrant 4: Not Urgent & Not Important: These tasks are often the ones we put there because we want to. (In financial terms, this is called “return on investment.” I like thinking of my tasks like that.) Often you’ll find you can eliminate some of these items, or delegate them to others. Because they’re not important, you have to decide if the time they’ll take to complete are worth the benefits of completing the task. Third in priority- these tasks only get completed after you’ve completed, or scheduled, quadrants 1 & 2. Worst case scenario- if your day is filled up with all #1s, these #2s can usually be postponed to a later time. Or spending time with family- important because it aligns with your life priorities and goals, but doesn’t need to be done by a specific time. (See the pattern?) Cleaning out your closet goes here. Important, right? And the deadline is in 3 days- urgent? Definitely! This tells you that you need to do this task ASAP. Let’s say your son’s field trip permission slip is due on Friday- if you don’t get it in, he can’t go. They include tasks that are high in both urgency & importance. THE QUADRANTSĪfter determining the urgency & importance of each of your items, you combine your results to place each task in one of the four quadrants. This task has a higher importance level, but lacks urgency. And yet, “clean out my closet”, though not deadline driven, is still important because half of the clothes you own don’t fit anymore or are out of season- you need to purge some and store others away. You still want to do it, but the importance factor has then gone down. Importance: Does it really matter if you get this thing done or not? Or is it just a “want to” kind of task? In the above examples, let’s say that you’re not super close to Sarah (she’s a work colleague’s daughter) and if you don’t bring a gift, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
But “clean out my closet”, though it may be very needed, doesn’t have to be done by a specific time. Urgency: Does the task have a deadline, or is it time sensitive? Something like “buy a wedding gift for Sarah” needs to be done by next Saturday, so you can bring it with you when you attend. When you want to evaluate your tasks, you need to consider each of these for each task. It works like this: The top two sections are categorized in urgency, the bottom two in importance. It’s called the “Time Management Matrix”.
Working together, these two things create a grid where you can judge all incoming tasks to determine your next best step. But how do we know which tasks are the most important? Productivity guru Stephen Covey, in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” explained a system to organize your tasks based on two criteria: urgency and importance. Sometimes, I just have to prioritize the most important tasks and know I’ve done my best. As much as it’s difficult for me to admit, I continually have to remind myself that I simply cannot do everything every day. It’s easy to get bogged down with your growing task list when it seems you’re adding more than you’re accomplishing.