(See the pattern?) Cleaning out your closet goes here.
![stephen covey urgent important stephen covey urgent important](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/541986a4e4b0a2d262fb18cd/1446123585092-1UQ2OOS0NISLYA8CBGXW/Keicha_3.png)
Important, right? And the deadline is in 3 days- urgent? Definitely! This tells you that you need to do this task ASAP. Let’s say your son’s field trip permission slip is due on Friday- if you don’t get it in, he can’t go. They include tasks that are high in both urgency & importance. THE QUADRANTSĪfter determining the urgency & importance of each of your items, you combine your results to place each task in one of the four quadrants. This task has a higher importance level, but lacks urgency. And yet, “clean out my closet”, though not deadline driven, is still important because half of the clothes you own don’t fit anymore or are out of season- you need to purge some and store others away.
![stephen covey urgent important stephen covey urgent important](https://www.timecounselor.com/images/Covey_Time_Matrix_Web.jpg)
You still want to do it, but the importance factor has then gone down. Importance: Does it really matter if you get this thing done or not? Or is it just a “want to” kind of task? In the above examples, let’s say that you’re not super close to Sarah (she’s a work colleague’s daughter) and if you don’t bring a gift, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But “clean out my closet”, though it may be very needed, doesn’t have to be done by a specific time. Urgency: Does the task have a deadline, or is it time sensitive? Something like “buy a wedding gift for Sarah” needs to be done by next Saturday, so you can bring it with you when you attend. When you want to evaluate your tasks, you need to consider each of these for each task. It works like this: The top two sections are categorized in urgency, the bottom two in importance. It’s called the “Time Management Matrix”.
![stephen covey urgent important stephen covey urgent important](https://www.lingfordconsulting.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Covey-Matrix-simple-Sept-2021.png)
Working together, these two things create a grid where you can judge all incoming tasks to determine your next best step. But how do we know which tasks are the most important? Productivity guru Stephen Covey, in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” explained a system to organize your tasks based on two criteria: urgency and importance. Sometimes, I just have to prioritize the most important tasks and know I’ve done my best. As much as it’s difficult for me to admit, I continually have to remind myself that I simply cannot do everything every day. It’s easy to get bogged down with your growing task list when it seems you’re adding more than you’re accomplishing.