Yesterday afternoon, I charted all the "to-do’s" for my professional life onto Stephen Covey’s quadrants:
- Urgent and Important
- Not Urgent and Important
- Urgent and Not Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
This was an assignment given to me by my coach last week, when I was feeling overwhelmed. The engineer in me enjoyed the picture that emerged.
I used flipchart paper and placed colored post-it notes in each quadrant, in gradations of importance and urgency. The good news–I had only one item in the urgent and not important bucket (email). The bad news–80% of my items were in the Not Urgent and Important bucket. No wonder I couldn’t prioritize. That’s where the placement inside the quadrant has helped. Higher in the box, more important. Closer to the left edge, more urgent.
As luck would have it, Seth Godin had a great post yesterday on just this topic. It’s all about how we consciously choose to spend our time. The operative word is consciously. You may not want to get as detailed as I did on my chart, but I guarantee that once you look at your to-do list with this lens, you’ll sleep alot better at night. And now it’s time to tackle a new item for today under Urgent and Important–taking my kids to a neighborhood Fourth of July pancake breakfast.