Organising and prioritising: five steps and four quadrants

Knowing that time has value changes nothing if your day is decided by the phone and the inbox. Whoever carries their tasks in their head and deals with things as they arrive works a lot and moves forward little, because other people’s urgent matters always shout louder than your own important ones.

By the end of this lesson you will have a system for getting tasks out of your head and into a place you trust, you will be able to place each one in its quadrant according to whether it is urgent and important, and you will be able to turn all that into today’s list, with three levels of priority and an order.

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Now practise with the matrix. Assign each task in the example list to its quadrant and add two or three of your own from this week. When you finish you will see a comment for each task and what to do with each quadrant: do, plan, delegate or eliminate. Notice which ones you hesitate over, which are almost always those that are urgent without being important, and how many of yours fall into “plan”: that is where your week is decided.

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Takeaways

• Tasks are kept in a reliable place, not in memory: collect, process, organise, review and do.
• Urgent and important are two different questions; importance rules.
• The quadrant of the important but not urgent is the one you plan; otherwise it comes back as an urgency.
• The day’s list separates “must”, “should” and “could”, and carries a number per task.