Habit 3 – Put First Things First

Habit 3 is taking the ‘program’ you have written in habit 2 – your personal mission statement, your plans, and goals – end executing around them. It’s putting them first, taking action on them before acting upon other things.

Covey introduces the Time Management Matrix, which contains 4 quadrants. On the top quadrants are the things that are important, and the bottoms two are things that are not important. Important here means that they are in alignment with your mission and your goals. On the left are things that are urgent, and the on the right are things that are not urgent. When you think about activities that you can focus on in your life you can categorize them into these quadrants:

Q1: Important and Urgent. These are problems, or crises.

Q2: Important but Not urgent. These are activities in the domains of prevention, investment, seeking new opportunities.

Q3: Urgent, but not important. Things that are proximate and appear pressing, but may or not be.

Q4: Not important or urgent. These things are often ‘pleasant’.

A phone call is an examples of something that is urgent. It appears to require immediate attention, but it may actually not be important. The same goes with mail and email. (How many times a day do you check your email?) Actually, anything that is in your environment be a potential distraction, and fall into Q3 or Q4, because it is proximate and thus appears urgent.

The Essence of Effective Time Management

If you take away one idea from this, it is that effective people focus on Q2, not Q3. They put important tasks that aren’t even pressing, before urgent matters that don’t really further their mission. This is the essence of effective time management.

If you neglect Q2 activities, small problems that you may not even be aware of become crises - Q1 activities. This called ‘managing by crisis’ Covey makes the point that you always have some discretionary time, and that if you want to be effective in life, spend it in Q2.