David Allen

Re-appreciation: Covey’s 4 Quadrants and GTD

: Cover of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

When I first discovered Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants Time Management framework, it immediately, not only made sense, but I felt like I had for the first time a real model for understanding how to be productive.

For years I thought about the Four Quadrants, I used them for personal and career planning — I even used to draw then on other people’s white boards to try and teach them. I was a certified 4 Quadrants geek. Eventually life seemed to change and the signal got weak. David Allen wrote Getting Things Done and his ideas became my watchwords — everything was GTD.

I recently reviewed the Covey 4 Quadrants concepts and was still pleased with what it gave me. It gives me more than just a way to process my tasks, it gives me a hint as to how to set priorities.

Okay class, let’s review what we know.

The Four Quadrants are from Covey’s 1989 bestseller about Putting First Things First, called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The 7 Habits

Habit 1: Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Choice
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Vision
Habit 3: Put First Things First: Principles of Integrity & Execution
Habit 4: Think Win/Win: Principles of Mutual Benefit
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood: Principles of Mutual Understanding
Habit 6: Synergize: Principles of Creative Cooperation
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

The Four Quadrants are best visualized as a 2 X 2 matrix.

filemerrillcoveymatrix

Dividing the demands on you by Urgent and Not Urgent and Important and Not Important.

Then start numbering Quadrants as 1 and 2 Important and 3 and 4 as Not Important.

You can’t avoid taking care of demands in Quadrant 1, because if you don’t, you house might burn down, unfortunately most of your work day might be spent fighting organizational “fires” all in Quadrant 1.

Quadrant 3 seems important because it’s urgent, but much of it isn’t really, like spending too much time processing your email. In theory, you should never be doing activities in Quadrant 4, like watching re-runs of Friends for the fifth time.

Ah, but then there’s Quadrant 2 – Important but not Urgent. This is the area where you probably aren’t spending enough time. In Quadrant 2 you can improve your life and career. Study something new, exercise, relationship building,l earn a language, or even the unthinkable — planning.

The theory is that the more time you spend in Quadrant 2, the less you’ll have to spend in Quadrant 1 and that would be Getting Things Done.

Let’s Start Getting Things Done with GTD

A popular methodology for task management is based on a book by David Allen called “Getting Things Done”. The main concept of the methodology is that for your mind to work effectively, it has to stop spending all of its time just remembering what has to be done next and instead working on the actual actions of doing it.

According to the methodology, your mind should be emptied of these “open loop” distractions of “to dos” by storing them all in some kind of “trusted system” that you can then organize anduse to refer back to all your tasks.

The “trusted system” can be a notebook or a PDA or something on your computer.

gtd-logo GTD-Free is a application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is a straight forward implementation of the GTD methodology and can be used as the trusted system and for organizing your tasks.

The workflow for GTD consists of 5 steps, each represented by a process in GTD-Free. The Organize and Review steps are combined – and Do is called Execute (which sounds a little like the task is given a blindfold, a last cigarette and put up against a wall).

The basic idea is to do a “Collect(ion)” of all the tasks you’re carrying around in your head and “untrusted” systems (like stickies).

The next step is to Process the tasks by going from the top to bottom of your list, one at a time, determining if an item requires action and then filing it, throwing it away or incubating it for later action.

Then the Organizing step determines the next action the item requires to complete it and organizing it so that it can be done when ready. Reviewing the categories should be an on-going process done daily with a major review done weekly.

Do is pretty simply, when you finally start working on the items to get them finished.

GTD Workflow:

Collect
Process
Organize
Review
Do

GTD-Free is a great free way to begin to explore GTD and to find out whether it makes sense for you. If you like it, there are scores of other systems to help you collect, process and organize your tasks. We’ll be reporting on others of them here at Enquiring Mimes from time to time.

Download GTD-Free [via lifehacker]