From margaritas to Quadrant II: My time management lesson

Many apologies for not posting for a week, but the past week has been pretty stressful with crunch time coming strong at work. I’ve got a 63,000-piece mailer dropping next week, and our major gift campaign goes public on April 29. Running back and forth with all the tasks at hand sent my stress levels to a high that could only be mitigated by Margarita Thursday at the local Mexican diner.

My boss — a good friend and mentor — noticed my stress and challenged me to move from being reactive to the admittedly crazy workload to calmly concentrating on our priorities. I noodled on his advice over the weekend, and checked out some information one of our trustees passed along a few months ago — Covey’s four quadrant time management system.

It seemed a little hokey at first, but Stephen Covey’s matrix system has given me plenty of insight on how I can be more effective and drastically decrease stress.

Four Quadrant matrix

Quadrant I contains things that are both urgent and important, akin to firefighting or triage work. Life naturally puts us in this quadrant from time to time because stuff happens and we have to respond to it. However, we often send things into crisis mode because of procrastination and lack of planning. Spending too much time here will lead to stress and burnout, which I definitely experienced at a previous job whose culture was deeply rooted in Q1.

Quadrant II is where we need to be; it contains things that are important, but not urgent. Tasks can be scheduled when you can give quality thought to them. Quadrant II is where we do long­range planning, anticipate and prevent problems, empower others, and increase skills through personal development. Ignoring this Quadrant enlarges Quadrant I, creating stress, burnout and deeper crises.

Good examples of Quadrant II tasks include preparing for an important meeting, building relationships with coworkers and mentors, family time, meaningful personal time, and exercise.

Quadrant III activities are masked distractions. They must be dealt with right now, but frankly, are not important. People in this quadrant react to things that are urgent assuming they are also important. Often the urgency of these matters is based on
the priorities and expectations of other people, and operating here produces a short­term focus, broken relationships and a loss of control.

The final quadrant, Quadrant IV, includes things which are neither urgent nor important — pure wastes of time. Some meetings could fall into this category - they’ve been scheduled in advance, but if they achieve nothing, or you don’t contribute to them, then they have simply wasted time. Some of my examples include commuting (I traveled 35 minutes each way in my last two jobs), reading the latest political news and gossip, and most YouTube adventures.

After such a stressed-out week, I’m making it a goal to shift my work and home time to Quadrant II and do as Covey advises: define my personal and professional priorities then organize and execute around them.

At work, those priorities are our major gifts and direct mail programs. On the personal front, it’s reading and blogging, spending time with my girlfriend and best friends, meeting new friends in Durham, and getting in better shape.

Each week, I’ll be revisiting my priorities and scheduling tasks to make progress on them. I can already notice a huge difference in my productivity, and I think I’ll not need a margarita to calm stress for a while. This Thursday, they’ll be just for fun (haha).

I borrowed the image from The Quixotic Hierophant . For more information on Covey’s “First Things First” model, check out this 1994 essay on his website.

April 17, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Career

 

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