The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Habit Three: Put First Things First

Like the first two habits, the third’s title is somewhat unclear. This sounds like it is saying, “Do the most important things,” or “When performing a task, arrange the subtasks in a sensible order.”

In reality, this habit could better be rephrased as “Effectively manage your time in order to maximize your long-term outcomes.” 

Covey breaks activities up into four categories, or quadrants:

Quadrant I is important and urgent activities, such as handling crises, pressing problems, and deadline-driven projects.

Quadrant II is important but not urgent activities, such as prevention, building our power capacity, exercise, relationship building, recognizing new opportunities, planning, and recreation.*

Quadrant III is non-important but urgent activities, such as interruptions, some calls, some mail, some reports, some meetings, proximate pressing matters, and popular activities.*

Quadrant IV is non-important, non-urgent activities such as trivia, busywork, some mail, some phone calls, time wasters, and pleasant activities.*

Most people spend most of their time in Quadrants I, III, or IV. But this is an ineffective way to live.

If you’re spending all of your time in Quadrant I, you’re going to suffer from excessive stress and burnout. Clearly you have to handle Quadrant I issues when they come up, but your goal should be to plan your life/work/home better so they don’t come up very often.

If you’re spending all your time in Quadrant III, you’ll be spinning your wheels and not accomplishing much. Your goals and plans will be worthless, and you’ll feel victimized and out of control.

If you’re spending all your time in Quadrant IV, you’ll be lazy, irresponsible, unreliable, and dependent on handouts for your basic survival.

The goal should be to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II, on the important but not urgent things. This is where you build up your own personal capital, and prevent the Quadrant I crises from happening in the first place. But few people make the time to do this, because it doesn’t seem urgent and pressing.

“It’s usually not the dramatic, the visible, the once-in-a-lifetime, up-by-the-bootstraps effort that brings enduring success. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.”

[Quoting E.M. Gray’s The Common Denominator of Success] “The successful pwerson has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”

Covey then spends a lot of time talking about a personal time management system. This is his method in a nutshell:

1. Once a week, write down the different roles you see yourself as having. (For example, “Individual, husband, father, Assistant Distribution Manager, Friend, Volunteer Coordinator for Rotary Club, Homeowner”)
2.  Write down one to three important results you want to accomplish for each of those roles over the next week. (“Buy new backpack for Jimmy”; “Develop widget distribution plan”; “Fix leaky toilet”; “Decide on vacation plans, maintain health.”) Make sure some of these goals reflect Quadrant II activities.
3. Block out the time for these activities over the next seven days.
4. Maintain flexibility if more important priorities come up – especially priorities involving relationships with people.

Also, delegation is one of the best tools for both saving time and increasing effectiveness. Time spent teaching an employee or child how to do a task – or even better, empowering them to do the task in their own way – will pay off many times over.

What’s the skeptical view on this? The different quadrants of activity is more or less common sense. Obviously it’s better if we can spend most our time on things that are important but not urgent. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and all that. 

But I think Covey is a little too glib and unsympathetic in portraying this as a choice. A single mother raising three kids and working two jobs just to make ends meet is probably going to be stuck in Quadrant I most of the time, yanked from crisis to crisis. When she does get a spare moment, she’ll want to spend it just taking a breath and relaxing, because humans have finite energy, willpower, and time.

I don’t see his time-management system as the panacea he seems to think it is. It works for him, and if it works for you, great. But every individual is different, and different people will respond differently to different kinds of time-management systems. This is my problem with all peddlers of time-management systems: They seem to assume everyone is exactly like them, so whatever system they like must work for all people.

That’s not to say there’s anything bad about the time-management system Covey’s developed. If you want to try it and see if it works for you, that’s great. But if you don’t think it’s right for you, that’s also perfectly fine. Self-improvement is not one-size fits all.

* I don’t know what the distinction is between recreation, popular activities, and pleasant activities. Apparently Covey thinks recreation is important but not urgent, popular activities are urgent but not important, and pleasant activities are neither important nor urgent. Why? Shrug.