Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix and How To Prioritize Your Tasks for a Better Life

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Excerpt: Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix will teach you the 4 types of “busy,” help you prioritize tasks, and show you a better way to live.

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Introduction: Better Organizing Our Busyness

Being busy is a blessing—It means that we’ve found a way to spend our time. Since time is our most precious resource in life, it follows that if we have, indeed, found ways to spend it, we should rejoice that our time isn’t being wasted in idle.  If you’ve ever felt like there wasn’t enough time in the day to get everything done that you wanted to get done, then you know what being busy is all about.

Not all “busyness” is created equal however.  The caveat is that we have to be mindful of what it is we’re busy doing minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, of every day because it can be incredibly easy to get distracted and steered off track toward unimportant and meaningless “busywork.” The hope, of course, is that whatever it is that we’re busy doing on a day-to-day basis is adding value to our lives and the lives of others.  And if it’s not, then maybe we should question why it’s taking up any of our time in the first place.

If we’re going to manage our time effectively—again, our most precious resource—then we need to better understand how to properly prioritize all of our tasks and work so that we can stay on track and not succumb to meaningless, trivial matters.  Stephen Covey helps us with this with his Time Management Matrix.  All of the tasks that make up what keeps us busy every day, he splits up into four categories (depicted below), which makes our to-do lists more ‘black-and-white’ and a whole lot less ‘grey.’ Let’s take a look:

Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix:

A Closer Look at Each Quadrant:

Q-1: Quadrant of Necessity:  These are the urgent and important tasks that should be getting top priority in your to-do list.  These items might include things with impeding deadlines (that are important and have long-term consequences on your life), crisis and emergencies, immediate problems that need to be resolved, certain high priority e-mails, etc.

Q-2: Quadrant of Quality and Personal Leadership:  These are the non-urgent but important tasks that should be getting secondary priority in your to-do list.  These items might include long-term systems building, relationship building, career building, personal development, healthy living strategies, etc.

Q-3: Quadrant of Deception:  These are the urgent but not important tasks that should be getting third priority in your to-do list.  These items might include phone calls, texts, emails, minor requests as favors, etc.

Q-4: Quadrant of Waste:  These are the non-urgent and not important tasks that should be getting last priority in your to-do list.  These items might include mindless TV/ web surfing/ chatting, reading/ entertaining gossip and drama, excessive gaming, idling, etc.  This is the quadrant that is dangerously seductive.

How To Prioritize Your Tasks For A Better Life

Now that you understand where all of your tasks for your day fall, all that’s left to do is to organize. And it’s important that you take time to do this proactively and before the start of your day. Because once the day starts, habit kicks in and we’ll likely end up succumbing to the quadrants of deception and waste unnecessarily. How could we not?

It’s so easy to get carried away and consumed in the never-ending line up of calls, texts, emails, reminders, pop-ups, notifications, and gossip.  Many times, they ding, ping, and ring for our immediate attention and lead us astray from the important tasks that can have deep impacts on our lives.   These sacrifices, which happen one small distraction at a time, can lead to some of our biggest regrets in life—regrets of never finishing the important work that we felt we were put on this earth to do.

Never forget that your life’s work requires a lifetime.  It requires daily action and daily progress towards a vision that will forever evolve into the full potential of what you have to offer.  Don’t let your most important work get benched because of a few dings, pings, and rings.  Leave it all out in the world.  Don’t take it to the graveyard with you.

Because remember, as Les Brown reminds us, “The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or carry out their dream.” So keep on with your busy self! But, do so in the most organized and deliberate ways. It can make a lifetime of difference.

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