What's your process for making decisions about how you spend your time what you do and what you don't do? Are they done intentionally? That is your decisions are they made intentionally? Are they made simply haphazardly? Or do you simply follow a pattern, perhaps even a rut that you've gotten into? Well, I want to give you a tool that was created by Dr. Stephen Covey, one of my favorite writers in a book that impacted me greatly, many years ago called the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Hopefully you've read this book now. But in the book, he talks about distinguishing between the important and the urgent. And in this book, he uses this simple little set of quat this quadrants have four different sections. To help us to distinguish those things. And as you're listening to my voice, I want you to notice these quadrants here. popularized by Stephen Covey, you'll notice that from down the left side, these two quadrants on the left are things that are urgent.
The things on the right are things that are not urgent, the things across the top are important, the things on the bottom are unimportant. And then covey talks about where we should spend our time he labels these 12341 and two are the top two, three and four, the bottom two. Now on the top one, notice in our quadrants our colored quadrants you have in front of you that side are things that are important and urgent. And they can be things like demands or or necessities or simply daily fire fighting. They could be quick things that need to be delegated, but there there's some emergency, it could be even a sickness. It's an emergency.
The point about that is we manage those things. We manage the things that are urgent and important. And frankly, that takes a lot of our time, particularly as we rise in leadership. The second area over to the upper right, is where we are dealing with things that are important, but they're not urgent. Now, those are things like opportunities, and planning, and keeping critical thinking in the forefront. And it's considering macro issues.
By the way, it can also be relationships. It can be your own personal health. It could be strategic thinking and planning. It could be focusing on family and friends. Those things are all important, but they're not necessarily urgent. And then, in the bottom left, you see things we should avoid.
And those are things that are really busy. work, it can be a sense of urgency because someone thinks it's urgent. But it may not be important. that often happens when people haven't done things they need to do, and they throw it back in your lap. They either upwardly delegate or delegate in some way that doesn't really help you. It can be things that simply aren't, aren't critical.
It can be all sorts of busy work or activity, and we get in a rut of thinking, we have to get it done. But what we need to learn to do is to avoid those things. And then the bottom right are things that we really should limit. And that's where we're just focusing in on often ourselves, that's our free time and it's fine to have free time. We should enjoy our free time, but it can be useless free time, and that's where we need to do some critical thinking about what we should do. Well, what covey says is that in leadership, we want to focus the majority of our time 90% or so on number one, and number two, so we manage number one, and we focus Focus on number two.
Number two are things again that are important, but not urgent. In fact, he goes on to say that top leaders will spend somewhere between 70 and 80% of their time on number two, not number one. They'll focus in on things that are important, but not urgent, because if I do strategic planning, if I get enough sleep, if I keep relationships rich and full, if I care for people, if I do the kind of development personally and interpersonally, with others that help cement relationships, if I stopped to think if I develop my inner life and keep growing and reading and thinking and processing in my own growth, then I'm doing things that are important, and I'm creating capacity to be able to think clearly and minimize things that are important and even urgent. I can't do totally it. eliminate those, but I'll be able to think more clearly about them.
So I can spend more and more time doing the things that are important. And Natarajan. So my, my challenge to you here is to think about those things that are important to you. And we're giving you two tools in our resource center for this. One of the tools is a list of about 230 values. Sometimes we have a hard time thinking about things that are important.
And the way you do that is through values clarification. So you think about those values that are important to you. And what I want you to do is go through this list, circle those values that are important to you, and use those to help you think about things that are important but not necessarily urgent, but important. So you increase your importance level to those things that really count and you think about it carefully. And the second tool we're giving you is basically the same framework 1234 the quadrant Stephen Covey's it gave us except they're clear on the inside, and I won't Want you to look back at your last week, and I want you to make a list of those things you did that were important and urgent and the upper left and then important but not urgent and the upper right and then continue that work through the bottom two.
So you see how you're spending your time, it's really an assessment for you. And then of course, the action steps going to be going forward is dealing with your time the right way and starting to live in quadrant two, especially in quadrant one. That's where we want you to be and that's the habit we want you to get if you can do these two things. One, distinguish between just chronology, time chronological time Kronos and Kairos. The moment the opportunity and learn to maximize both of those, and at the same time, learn to focus in on those things that are important, both in the Kronos world and in the Kairos world. Then you're going to begin to have the right perspective toward time and you're going to decrease your distress Increase Your, your use stress in your energy and your power measurably.
So let's get to it.