Covey sets the stage this way.

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

“Well why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire.  “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

Maybe that reminds you of the business cliche, “too busy to plan”.

So, Covey is saying,  the way to make your work easier is to improve the quality of the tools you use.  He’s not just suggesting the guy take a break and then go back to sawing with the same dull saw.  He says improve the tool and then the work will be easier.

Covey suggests that working in these four areas will make the work of life easier.

• Physical
  Taking care of your body, staying healthy, focused on vitality
• Spiritual
  This is at the core, your life’s direction, your inner journey
• Mental
  Taking care of your brain and your acuity
• Social / emotional
  Investing in relationships and interdependence

So what better time than this weekend to take a walk, do a little exercise, meditate or go to your church/synagogue (remember, one of the positives of organized religion is the sense of community as well as the spiritual), read a book, spend time with friends?

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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.

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.