This writing I will start with two questions for you.
1. What does it need to bring amazing growth in your professional life?
2. What does it need to bring amazing peace in your personal life?
Keep the answers within yourself for the moment. I will come back here again.
We all know the Eisenhower matrix of priority management. It directs us to arrange our priorities into 4 quadrants. Below is the matrix.
Those who are already using this matrix to manage their priorities know what it means by which quadrant. I am putting a short intro for those who are not used to it. If you have lots of priorities to focus on, you can organize them in this 4 quadrant. You will have something that is Urgent and Important (need immediate action), something Not Urgent but Important (don’t need immediate action but value adding for future), something Urgent but Not Important (not value adding but if you want to focus, will need immediate action) and rest of the things Not Urgent and Not Important.
Now , which quadrant has the highest priority? Ideally we allocate our time to Urgent and Important tasks first and this is very normal. Because in this quadrant we get some tasks that need immediate action and they deserve our first attention. These kinds of things can be your assignment submission, writing meeting minutes, making important phone calls to clients for bills etc.
By default people are driven by urgency (even if it’s not important), deadlines and problems. Even sometimes we allocate our time for quadrant 3 as well before quadrant 2! Example: Maybe you meet one of your friends every week. But still if he makes a phone call to you during your office hours and you know that he won’t tell you anything important, you prefer to respond to his phone call than to focus on some of your official important things (like preparing for a meeting of next week). Because the phone ring is creating an artificial sense of urgency within you!
Now, which quadrant actually deserves your more time or more value? With a surprise, this is Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent but Important)! We should even give more weightage to quadrant 2 than quadrant 1. If you focus more on quadrant 2, it will make your list of quadrant 1 smaller. Our quadrant 1 list becomes very long because we don’t focus on quadrant 2 and we don’t take the opportunity to finish our important task when it is not urgent.
One example of how focusing on quadrant 2 can reduce the pressure on quadrant 1 is Physical Exercise. How many of us take physical exercise as a preventive (important) action for a healthy life? Very less. The moment you are attacked with a disease (like Diabetes, high blood pressure etc) and the doctor prescribes you to do a physical activity of at least 1 hour everyday, you start running every morning (maybe 2-3 months back, you were not convinced even for a 30 min daily morning walk)! But by this time physical exercise is already in your urgent and important list. Your body already earned a disease for a lifetime and is undergoing many difficulties. Maybe previously what was possible with a 3o min morning walk is impossible now with a 1 hour running.
The same thing happens in our professional life. We don’t focus on our mission, important agenda for next month, or building relationships with clients (just because they are not urgent now). But when the day comes, we have nothing in hand and need to work on those even with a time allocation after office hours. We remain fire fighters.
Now I will finish the writing with the questions I asked at the beginning. I hope you already have the answer in your mind. And I believe your answer is basically a Quadrant 2 activity. If yes, give most of your focus on Quadrant 2. If not, think again and focus on Quadrant 2 😉.