Health & Fitness
How Are You Spending Your Time?
Build your sense of self-accomplishment. Use this blog to help time manage and become more effective with daily tasks.
THE QUADS OF TIME
How often do you get to the end of your day, sit back, and frustratingly wonder what you’ve accomplished? You know you were moving and keeping busy, but how much did you actually get done? Think for a moment. Or, maybe you took the day off to get refreshed, and at the end of it, you felt more exhausted than you started. Sound familiar? This happens to everyone, and there’s a good explanation for it.
This empty, mouse-wheel feeling, is likely stemming from the deficiency of an emotion. A powerful emotion! SELF-ACCOMPLISHMENT.
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Dr. Stephen Covey teaches us that we spend all of our time in one of four quadrants, things that are:
- Important and urgent
- Important but not urgent
- Not important but urgent
- Not important and not urgent
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Quadrant ONE is easy to understand. Most of us know when something is important and urgent. If your gaslight comes on in your car, you’d better fill the tank. When the bills come in the mail, they need to be paid or the lights go out. If you’re a business owner, then making payroll and meeting a deadline qualifies. For the parents out there, it’s getting your children to school on time. These are all necessities.
Quadrant FOUR is just as easy. Things that are not important and not urgent include watching movies, television sitcoms, and checking your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts while at work. 99% of the time, this is a complete WASTE-OF-TIME. These items often catch us off-guard, and before we know it, hours have gone by and we have lost our grip on time.
Here’s where it can get tricky!
Quadrant THREE can be deceptive if we’re not careful. These items are urgent, and because they are urgent, we mistake them as being important. If you are like many of my friends, you are trained to hover over your phone until it buzzes, whistles, chimes or chirps. This immediately evokes a muscular reflex until you’ve learned what great and important call, message or update has summoned you. Most of the time it’s a status update, Words With Friends move or the person you used to eat lunch with in kindergarten requesting your friendship over Fakebook. Oops.
Sometimes, however, it’s mowing your lawn or washing your car. Maybe you’ve gotten to a place in life where some important things can now be done by others so that you can do things that only YOU can do. This is the art of delegation. If you were making millions would you still be doing your own taxes? Making the tax deadline is an urgent matter but it’s not necessarily important that YOU do it? Get my drift? Be careful that you are not using up all your time on urgent but not important things.
Quadrant TWO is the important but not urgent things. This is where you make life meaningful. This is where quality and value is built. Prayer, reading to your kids, exercising, reading a non-fiction book, having your spine checked, budgeting, writing your vision, changing your oil, rewriting your vision and building relationships all fall in this category. Sadly, we live in a society that tends to keep us on the move and draws our attention to “urgent” matters. Consequently, we miss out on the building blocks of success and fulfillment. We miss out on the SELF-FULFILLMENT that the items in this quad will produce.
Here’s the take-away!
If you discipline yourself to quad two activities, you will more effectively discover your God-given gifts, talents and dreams.
If you avoid quad two activities, they may very quickly become quad one: Important and urgent. If you do not change your oil, you may be buying a new engine. If you do not budget your finances, you may go bankrupt. It’s the same with bad health leading to hospital bills or an unhealthy marriage leading counseling. These important items must be tended to or else they will become very urgent.
ACTION STEP:
Budget your day and tell your time what to do. Give it a job. That way you won’t be wondering where it went. Set a goal in-order to stick to QUADS ONE & TWO. At the end of the day, pick one thing you could have done better. Discipline yourself to this, and one month later you will find yourself walking with a greater sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT!
Live Abundantly,
Dr. Mark E. Crowell
Ramsey D. Entreleadership: 20 years of practical business wisdom from the trenches. Howard Books. NY: 2011
