Four Quadrants Time Management

When you are doing any kind of work, it is more important for you to do it right rather than doing it fast. It's also important to focus on long-term goals and use the best approach to achieve it. If you are lacking in time management skills there are tools available for you to efficiently use the hours in one day. Continue reading to learn about the four quadrants time management.

Planning and prioritizing will be the key for productivity. If you have a detailed plan, this will cause you to have less stress and can achieve your desired goals. It's important to figure out the goals you want to achieve. After you have defined these goals, you have to develop a plan to achieve them. In order to accomplish this, create a list with the steps you have to execute to achieve a certain goal.

When you create a detailed list of tasks this could make your goal seem even more overpowering, so it's important to prioritize your tasks. Stephen Covey has a book called First Things First, where he discusses a time matrix. By using this approach, you would categorize your activities to fit in one out of these four quadrants:

1. Urgent & important
2. Important, but not urgent
3. Urgent, but not important
4. Neither important, nor urgent

Preferably, you need to learn how to manage your task so you rarely have activities under the first quadrant. But, crises might arise when you do some form of fire-fighting. These will be the tasks to deal with as the top priority.

The next priority will be placed in quadrant two.

The tasks in quadrant three shows that you did not prepare and cannot prioritize.

Finally, quadrant four consists of tasks which normally waste your time and must be avoided. Reducing and/or eliminating activities in quadrants three as well as four will allow you to spend additional time on the activities in the first two quadrants in order to remain efficient.

How can you avoid distractions and the activities in quadrant three and four in order to remain focused? Well, the best resolution is to schedule your time. Schedule time for task with higher priority and maintain some open time daily for networking tasks such as building relationship and mentoring.

A highly effective approach for time management would be to effectively manage the peak and non-peak productivity times daily. Generally, higher productivity times will be in the morning. Early afternoons after lunch break are generally less productive. You can schedule meetings during this time in order to efficiently use your time.

A crucial and important aspect when it comes to planning and prioritizing would be learning how and when to “Say No”. While it will be tempting to answer a phone call from a close friend, allowing it to ring when you are working on priority task may be the smarter move to make. Learn how to appreciate your time and then get other people to do the same.