![]() Even a modest goal of increasing our Quadrant 2 tasks by 20% while reducing our urgent tasks by 20% would have a beneficial long term effect, for our organizations and for our sanity. Habit 1, 2, 3 are about achieving independence. ![]() Quadrant 2: exercise, reading continual education, being connected to your community. You are made to act and not be acted upon. If we were to break down the percentage of Quadrant 1, Quadrant 2, and Quadrant 3 tasks in our current planning cycles, almost inevitably we will find way too many Quadrant 1 and 3 tasks and not nearly enough (if any) Quadrant 2 tasks. To work on Quadrant 2: you have to be proactive, you must act upon Quadrant 2. To correct this imbalance, we must shift our paradigm of prioritization. The longer a company has been around, the more chronic the problems of focusing purely on “urgent” projects, which include a reliance on antiquated systems, a lack of talent development, and a disengaged workforce. We are, as Covey pointed out, suffering from “urgency addiction”. Thus, we all think we are working on Quadrant 1 tasks, all the time. Although Quadrant 3 is meant to represent “urgent AND not important”, in reality, the way we tend to organize tasks is it to make these important BECAUSE they are urgent. These are long-term investments in growth and development, building infrastructure, updates to technology and security, and all those activities that essentially “Sharpen the Saw”-or improve our ability to be effective. The paradox is that Quadrant 2 activities, which we never get around to, are actually the items with the highest future value. ![]() The urgent nature of these tasks cause them to naturally rise to the top. These are the fires that must be put out the initiatives to boost earnings for the quarter or the year pressing emails and phone calls, and so forth. The problem is most of us spend our day largely dealing with Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 activities because they’re time-sensitive. According to this model, every task can be put into one of 4 “quadrants”: In the book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey offered a model which illustrates the problem with conventional prioritization. But even with a rigorously objective process, the most common problem is that short term concerns get prioritized over long term ones. Ranking the weights of various options may also be swayed by personal judgments. It’s the way an organization prioritizes that often determines its effect.Ĭertainly psychology and group dynamics come into play stronger personalities “get their way” more often than others, skewing the way things are prioritized. Prioritization is a critical process when resources are limited, but it doesn’t always result in the best outcome.
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