Your Time Management Strategy Is Broken

I just searched “time management strategy” and Google returned 18,100,000 results. Let that sink in for a second…. 18 million.

This post isn’t about adding another checklist, app, calendar organizer, or whatever else into your time management arsenal. The fact is, these things just make us more busy, not more effective. If you find yourself saying “I’m too busy, I can’t get {insert something important you care about here} done”, chances are you have busy-itis. Yes, you.

But there is a cure!

The purpose of this post is to share a strategy I learned from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It helps us to better use our calendars, to-do lists, and post-its to beat busy-itis and be more effective with our lives.

Oh yeah… fully readable in less than 5 minutes (as is tradition).

The Covey Quadrant

The Covey Quadrant is simple; it splits activities into 4 sections.

• Quadrant 1: Things that are important and urgent. You should do these tasks immediately and yourself if possible.
• Quadrant 2: Things that are important and not urgent. You should decide when you want to get these things done, and schedule them.
• Quadrant 3: Things that are not important but urgent. These things should be delegated whenever possible.
• Quadrant 4: Things that are not important and not urgent. These activities should be avoided all together.

By building an understanding and awareness of what quadrant we are working in throughout the day, we can start to better understand where our time is going.

One common trap is to be stuck in Quadrants 1 and 3, living a life of busy-itis. The way out of that trap is to start delegating tasks from Quadrant 3, to free up time to repurpose into Quadrant 2.

Ideally, we should spend all of our time in Quadrants 1 and 2. These are the highest leverage activities and tasks that will give us the best return on our time.