Stephen Covey Four Quadrants

[Landers Piechotka]

TheUrgent Important Matrix is a powerful productivity and time management tool to help people manage their time more effectively. It divides tasks into 4 quadrants according to how urgent and important they are, which helps people understand where their time goes and be more productive with the time they have.

The Urgent Important Matrix is great for a wide spectrum of coaches from career, executive and business coaches to life, parent and spiritual coaches. You can also use The Urgent Important Matrix with youth and anyone disorganized to help them be more focused. It also makes a compelling experiential tool to use in a workshop or webinar, and remember to use it for yourself too...

Former US President Eisenhower used this so-called Eisenhower Principle to organize his tasks. He is quoted as saying, "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important." But it was Dr Stephen Covey (who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) who took these concepts mainstream in his book, calling it The Urgent Important Matrix.

This can be anything from an overdue project or report to customer complaints, a severe bottleneck or broken business process right through to a burst pipe or a health issue like a toothache that hasn't been dealt with!

What: This is your MAGIC quadrant! Also called the big picture quadrant, these actions move us towards our big goals and projects. They could include planning, relationship and team-building, issue prevention and risk-assessment and even health and recreational activities that help us maintain balance in our lives like a dentist appointment or booking a plumber.

How we feel: When we spend a lot of time in this quadrant we feel calmer and under control, we deal with most issues before they arise and are likely to have solid support from others. All of this means fewer crises to manage later which is good for our clients, their careers AND the organizations they work for.

What: Tasks or activities in this quadrant interrupt or take us away from our important tasks. This could be anything from co-workers stopping by for a chat, unnecessarily checking your email, answering the phone to other people's interruptions and unimportant meetings.

How we feel: When we spend a lot of time in this quadrant we feel like we're not achieving much or getting anywhere. Often, as a result, we react to others unpleasantly and feel stuck, frustrated and stressed out.

What: Time spent in this quadrant are distractions from the tasks at hand. They can range from excessive or irrelevant email or phone calls from friends, social media usage to any activity we use that wastes time and avoids necessary work. These distractions lead to us being late, not finishing projects or tasks on time and can leave us tired, stressed and unable to be effective.

In our personal lives things like excessive TV or internet surfing at home can also fall into this category. At an extreme, too much time spent in this quadrant can lead to negative self-talk, depression and even people being fired!

The Urgent Important Matrix is an incredibly helpful concept. But remember that how much time your client spends in each quadrant will depend on many things including their personalities, how excited they are about their jobs, life and the type of job (and even boss), that they have.

Chock full of powerful tips, techniques and concepts, the coaching tools in this toolkit help your clients transform, prioritise and make better use of the time they have. See the 9 products included >>

Emma-Louise Elsey has been coaching since 2003 and is the Founder of The Coaching Tools Company and Fierce Kindness.com. She's passionate about coaching and personal development. Originally a project and relationship manager for Fortune 500 companies she combined her love of coaching, creativity and systems to create over 100 brandable coaching tools, forms and exercises including 30+ completely free coaching tools. She now serves coaches and the coaching world through her exclusive newsletter for coaches, Coaches Helping Coaches Facebook Group and many other great tools for coaches, plus resources and ideas for your coaching toolbox. The Coaching Tools Company is an official ICF Business Solutions Partner.

Hi Akinjide, the idea with The Urgent Important Matrix is to stop the "urgent" matters BEFORE they become urgent by planning and being organized! This tool helps you see where you might be spending your time, and making changes to be more effective ? Warmly, Emma-Louise

The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the few productivity techniques that I actually find useful! It helps me focus on what I need to get done first. I actually use a platform called eisedo, which automatically prioritises my tasks into one of the four quadrants. It saves me a lot of time in deciding where to start and really helps me to make genuine progress!

In the age of the smartphone, where an endless stream of distractions awaits us menacingly in our pockets, managing our time is increasingly becoming more challenging. And there are a whole lot of time management techniques out there to make us more productive, but one stands out: The Covey Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey.

This tool is particularly useful for better focusing our attention on the to-do list items that matter and ultimately increasing the long-term success of our businesses. Think prioritized list making, personal productivity, the seven habits of highly effective people, and managing all the most urgent things in our lives. Let's dive in.

These are the items that are likely causing you the most stress, and those that should be prioritized above all else. These are critical to achieving your goals (and your clients' goals!) and should be handled quickly and efficiently.

Q2 lacks the urgency that we see in Q1, but these tasks are just as important. To sum it up, they are important but not urgent. Because they don't involve impending deadlines and don't require immediate action, you have the freedom to breathe and take your time in figuring out how to perform these tasks effectively.

These aren't your most important or urgent items, but they are time-sensitive. These tasks can really throw our schedules and priorities out of alignment because we tend to confuse urgency with importance.

Let's say you get a work call while having dinner with your parents. Family is the important thing here and often you have limited time with them in your life, but you sacrificed that time to dive back into work when the call could have waited and was not urgent. This is where you need to learn to manage time and focus. Some Q3 items might be:

When it comes to effective time management, it's highly important to know what falls in Q4, because these items are the items you should not be wasting your time on. They are often not urgent or important. Classify them as low priority and ensure you tackle quadrants 1, 2, and 3 first. There are a million things that could land in Q4, but here are some common qualities:

It's safe to say that you should always prioritize the biggest tasks you need to accomplish to meet deadlines. But the many little tasks along the way always threaten to throw a wrench in the productivity wheel.

Using a task management tool gives you a quick view of the tasks you need to accomplish. Plus, you can rearrange the order of tasks with drag-and-drop ease. Indy has a free task management tool to help you put the Covey Matrix into action.

Now it's time to place the tasks into the four quadrants model. It may take a bit of time to assess which tasks are truly important, especially when every task seems major at the moment. But once you're finished, you'll have a better understanding of the urgent tasks going forward, and this process of labeling tasks within quadrants will get easier as you do it.

Productivity is crucial in the workforce, but it can also be challenging having to balance multiple tasks. Following a well-established framework for getting things done makes it easier to handle urgent matters.

Since productivity is such an important topic, we have some bonus tips to help you crush your time management goals. Here are some productivity tips that you can use alongside the Covey Matrix. Let's dive in!

When working through your to-do list, it's best to work on tasks that are similar in nature. It takes the brain time to readjust when moving on to a different task, so you can increase productivity by focusing on similar tasks that keep you "in the zone."

This may seem counterintuitive when you're trying to get a lot of assignments done, but studies have shown that multitasking doesn't help. We're just not equipped to process two dissimilar tasks at once, causing our brain to have to split its focus. For efficiency, it's better to stay focused on one task until it's complete.

Or maybe the faint ringing sound of silence is too distracting? In that case, you might get more work done when listening to relaxing music. Find the best environment for you and your productivity will get a boost.

Covey's Time Management Matrix might not be your be-all and end-all. And it doesn't have to be. What's important is finding a technique that helps you use your time spent and become more productive to reach your business and personal goals.

It can even help in your private life with managing those important things and all those activities including family. I'm a fan of the matrix because it's an objective-like helping hand when it comes to productivity, personal development, and time management strategies. But habits of highly successful people vary.

It just might be the game-changer you've needed to help establish a better work-life balance for the long run. Spend less time on the less important things in your life and more time on the more important things to help you grow in your personal life.

Fortunately, Stephen Covey came up with a time management matrix that helps us manage our daily tasks and priorities better. This matrix consists of four quadrants that divide tasks according to their level of importance and urgency.

3a8082e126