Monday Morning Match is a quick post – maybe a quote, inspirational story or idea – intended to spark some motivation inside each of you so your week gets off to a fantastic start on Monday morning.
If you’ve been in business for longer than a few minutes, chances are you’ve heard of Steven Covey. He wrote one of the quintessential books for anyone who deals with people in their career or life (which pretty much includes everyone) called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Covey also is credited with popularizing the Time Management Matrix seen below.
Here’s a simple identifier for each quadrant:
1 – Urgent & Important – items that need to be dealt with immediately.
2 – Important, but not Urgent – This is where your planning skills are critical. You want to achieve your long-term goals? Focus on this quadrant.
3 – Urgent, but not Important – “Poor planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine.” What are the “time suck” activities and “energy vampire” people who you encounter each week. Minimize them or eliminate them
4. Unimportant and non-Urgent – Trivial items, busy work and time wasters.
Take a look at the image again then, as you head into this new week, answer the questions below…
- Are you willing to take a few seconds before you react to things this week to truly assess which quadrant they belong in?
- Do some of your customers and clients think every issue they are dealing with belongs in Quadrant 1 when it more likely belongs in Quadrant 2 or 3?
- Do you find yourself getting distracted with activities that upon further review are simply distractions that are squarely in Quadrant 4.
- What would happen if you spent time at the end and beginning of each day and really analyzed your “to do list” and assessed what quadrant those activities fall in to?
I’m certain that building relationships, solving problems and having fun are just the 1-2 (quadrant) punch your business needs.
Spend your time focusing on these and you’ll be headed for a knockout week.
Photo Credit: MartialArtsNomad.com via Flickr