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Welcome to part four of the series on how to implement the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in a Getting Things Done-style system. Because this is a fairly intensive plan to implement, I am writing a series of posts that will guide you through the stages of implementation over seven (or so) weeks. This will give you a chance to focus on each new habit in your life for one full week before beginning the next one.

Each weekly post on the habits is supplemented by a worksheet to help you start focusing on the new habit.

For those of you who may not have read Stephen Covey’s landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here is a brief synopsis of the third habit: (from Wikipedia)

Put First Things First. Here, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at short-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear not to be urgent, but are in fact very important. Delegation is presented as an important part of time management. Successful delegation, according to Covey, focuses on results and benchmarks that are to be agreed upon in advance, rather than prescribed as detailed work plans.

This habit is so important that Stephen Covey wrote an entire book about it, which I recommend to everyone that I meet! You can order it from Amazon here [link].

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” ~ Goethe

The third habit is the practical application of what we learned in the first two habits. Habit 1: Be Proactive puts you in charge of your responsibilities and your environment. Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind shows you the steps that you need to follow to create a path toward completing the various tasks and activities that you are responsible for.

Putting First Things First is the habit that enables you to actualize your principles and values by prioritizing your tasks and actions. The daily exercise of assigning priorities according to your values and principles puts you in control of your current situation and points you toward advancing and achieving your long-term goals.

Ask yourself two questions

Get a piece of paper [or download the worksheet] and write down the answers to these 2 questions:

1) What is one thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my personal life?

2) What is another thing that I could do on a regular basis (But I am not doing now) that would make an important positive difference in my work or professional life?

Remember that there is no one “right” answer. Activities that have a positive impact on your life can vary, sometimes wildly. Some folks may have a simple answer like “Lose X pounds by eating a salad and walking for 15 minutes each day at lunch.” Others may have a more complex answer, such as “Improve personal communication skills and team cohesiveness by scheduling a weekly one-on-one meeting with each of the salespeople and going out on calls with them once per month.” Whatever your answer is it likely involves something that you already know that you should do yet, for whatever reason, don’t.

“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to their strength of purpose.” ~ E.M. Gray

Importance vs. Urgency

Take a look at the answers that you wrote down. Do they reflect an activity or practice that is important to your personal or professional development? Yes? If not, you may have a wrong answer!

Now for the tricky part: Do you consider this activity to be urgent? Most likely this answer is “No”, or you would not be neglecting it! The struggle of importance vs. urgency is one that we all face every day. The tasks and activities that we execute tend to be sorted by urgency, by the scale of their effect on our immediate situation.

I am sure that most of you reading this can recall a day when you were frantically busy “putting out fires” but nothing you would consider Important was accomplished. This is not to say that responding to a crisis is not important, and no one is recommending that you file your receipts when the building is on fire. But I would submit that taking proactive steps to avert crises is surely more important, yet considered less urgent. Whenever I am in this type of situation, the expression, “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there always seems to be time to do it over” comes to mind.

Your personal values and principles should reflect the idea that having the appropriate tools and training is not only important, but urgent, and must be acted upon.

The Time Management Matrix

One of Stephen Covey’s most famous contributions to the world of Time Management is the Time Management Matrix, as shown below:

This matrix (abbreviated as: TMM) divides the way we spend or invest our time into 4 Quadrants based on a value of Importance vs. Urgency. Most of us, before we took an active interest in productivity practices, likely spent a lot of time in Quadrants 1 & 4. The diametrically opposite states of crisis management and goofing off are the most common ‘default’ states for busy people. Because we spend time goofing off instead of investing time in preparedness, we are later forced to spend time recovering from catastrophe.

Being busy, however, is not the same as being productive. I know people that can be busy all day long and accomplish exactly zero by 5:00. One can be very busy maintaining the widget machine, but if there are no widgets being cranked then your time & effort do not count as being invested (i.e., generating a return) but as being spent.

Time that is simply spent is gone forever.

Covey contends that if we consciously work toward inhabiting the Quadrant 2 portion of the TMM we can avert the crises and problems of Quadrant 1, delegate or eliminate the ‘filler’ work of Quadrant 3, and avoid the wasteful spending of Quadrant 4.

How do we get there

One of my favorite movies is “Funny Farm“, starring Chevy Chase (no judging!!). There is a scene in the movie where a couple of hard-bitten New Yorkers working for a moving company ask for directions. The man they ask, an older fellow sitting on his porch sorting apples, responds to their question with, “If I was goin’ to Redbud, I wouldn’t start from here.”

How often do you feel like that while you are coping with an environment dominated by Q1 activities - emergencies, deadlines missed, crises, employee difficulties? At times like this Q2 can seem so far away that is seems like you can’t get there from here. The secret path to Q2 lies in reducing the size of Quadrants 3 & 4.

Delete, Defer, and Delegate

Take a look at the graphic of the TMM, and the types of activities described in Q3 and Q4. The very first thing that you can do to reduce the scale of this real estate is to Delete those tasks and activities that are:

1. Not Important
2. Not Urgent
3. Can be deleted without affecting the organization

Those “Fwd:Fwd:Fwd” e-mail jokes, Minesweeper, Solitaire games and the like all need to go. Show some discipline and you can have the ‘fun’ things back when you have grabbed the reins of everything else. Be ruthless. Those stacks of magazines that you have been meaning to read? Toss’em or file’em. But get them out of sight.

Second, take a look at the tasks or activities that can be Deferred. If it does not need to get done today, file it in the Tickler File, or write it in your calendar. Get rid of it. But be careful! Only Defer the things that have survived the Deletion phase and can’t (or shouldn’t) be done by someone else. Keep in mind that some of these tasks can become opportunities for development, your own or a team member’s.

The third step is to Delegate as much as possible, but be responsible about it. This is a powerful tool for leveraging your own Quadrant 2 real estate. Is there something on your list that can’t be delegated today, but could be turned into a training and development tool for one of your team members? This is a Q2 opportunity! Embrace the change and let planning, prevention, and relationship-building become your watchwords.

Learning to say “No”

Another method of increasing the amount of time you get to invest in Q2 is by saying “No” to some of the new inputs that belong to Quadrants 1, 3, & 4. Obviously there are assignments that you cannot say no to, but generally you can apply the following criteria to new inputs and demands on your time:

1. Does this new input/demand fall into Quadrant 2?
2. Does this new input/demand match my values and principles?
3. Does this new input/demand align with my Personal Mission Statement?
4. Does this new input/demand advance any of my long-term goals?

If the answer to 2 or more of these questions is “No”, then you should seriously consider that your answer to the new demand be “No”. Taking on a new task or activity that does not meet at least 2 of the above criteria will increase your stress level and have a negative impact on your overall productivity.

You will not want to do this new task, because it does not fit into your model for achieving your purposes, and it very well may not get your best efforts.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of this post, where we will examine methods and practices for investing more of your time in Quadrant 2, for greater returns on your productivity. Don’t forget to get the worksheet [right-click and “Save As”].

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/657hdq. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen