Sarah Sutton,
Natural Solutions,
sarahsutton54@yahoo.com
I find myself thinking about Steven Covey. His quadrant concept rings true for me these days. I am sure many of you are familiar with this. Picture an axis with “urgent/not urgent” as the x axis and “important/not important” as the y axis. You end up with the following quadrants:
I. Urgent/Important
II. Not Urgent/Important
III. Urgent/Not Important
IV. Not Urgent/Not Important
The most effective quadrant is II and includes all of the tips everyone has shared. Planning ahead, realistic time management, not over committing yourself and taking care of maintenance activities to avoid the crisis, whether your health or your car. Not paying attention to quadrant II activities on a routine basis will result on landing squarely in quadrant I. (Unpreventable crises, like family illness and injury do happen, but you can’t control those) Quadrant III includes all those pesky interruptions (email, phone, etc) that are not urgent and can usually be limited to set times. Quadrant IV includes activities that are not urgent and do not serve your goals. TV watching could be in IV or II, depending upon how the activity fits with your life’s priorities and needs. Nothing wrong with deciding to kick back and get some much-needed R&R (which is a quadrant II activity), but random channel hopping on a regular basis could also land you into quadrant I. Balance, priorities and clear goals. Now to apply this concept and keep out of quandrant I.
