They are usually more important for the other person than they are for you.
A good proportion of the emails in your inbox probably belong in this category as well. Things such as an unannounced visitor, a trivial request or meetings of little value often sit in this quadrant. However, if you examine them closely, you’ll realise that they are not really important … at least not to you anyway! These are tasks that are masquerading as important, based upon their sense of urgency. Quadrant 3 is the tricky quadrant, as I like to say. You can view my article on Time Blocking here. Try to block time out in your calendar and schedule them in. We need to plan to get these important/not urgent things done. The due date that was once a few weeks away is suddenly upon us and before we know it, that project belongs in Q1. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, a project sitting in Q2 may become urgent in time. They often require some effort to complete and sometimes they can take considerable time, over days or even weeks, to get done. And of course, these are often the tasks we procrastinate about doing because of the lack of urgency! Things such as your own planning, preparation, knowledge building or ‘looking after self’ sit in this quadrant. In this quadrant of the time management matrix sit all those tasks that are important but not urgent. You can rarely ignore them! There are usually unpleasant consequences of ignoring things in this quadrant. Things in Q1 need to be done, and they need to be done first. Of course, there are those important tasks that we’ve known about for some time but that weren’t urgent, but now we find ourselves up against a deadline and, all of a sudden, they turn up in this important and urgent quadrant. If you think about a factory, if the production line stops, that is clearly both urgent and important to deal with.
Things that are dropped onto us at short notice, or things that break, are largely unforeseen. Some of the tasks in this quadrant will be foreseen, but there will occasionally be some that we didn’t see coming. They often have a way of getting attention, in fact they often demand attention.
Tasks or projects that fit into this quadrant are those that are both urgent and important. Here is a brief overview of each of the four quadrants in the time management matrix. (See my Personal Productivity Training) For now, think of important tasks as those that relate to what you are paid to do.) (Determining what aspects of your work are important is really a whole other discussion – we spend a surprising amount of time on this topic alone in my training. Every task we need to do will usually sit in one of the following four quadrants based on their urgency and importance. Here is the Time Management Matrix as I usually present it. It’s been around a long time, but I love how it often reveals our inherent tendency to focus on urgent tasks at the expense of the important tasks we have to do.
When I talk to people about prioritising their workload or their time, I almost always use Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix.