Jesse Meijers

When I just started as an entrepreneur, managing my time was easy. I didn’t. I just put every bit of energy into my company. Of course I also had my education to focus on, but obviously it suffered. Sports suffered too, as I stopped playing any sport for about one or two years. Almost every bit of time went into my company. And then it failed. I felt miserable. Something had to change.

Time Management Today

Don’t believe people who tell you that time management is ’so ninety-whatever’. Today, with our high connectivity (mobile phone, email, email on your phone, Internet, Internet on your mobile phone, twitter and who knows how many other services), we need to be good at time management more than ever. And there is one proven method that stands out from all the others.

Importance and Urgency

Basically, this method is all about priorities. So far, nothing new. However, there are different priorities. One is importance. I hear you think ‘duh!’. But wait! The second priority is urgency… Right, how is that not the same? Let us discover from some easy examples.

Imagine you are walking through the city and you have your mobile phone on you. The phone rings. This ringing is urgent. It catches your attention. You take the phone out of your pocket. ‘Unknown caller’. How do you know if it is important? It could be the hospital, telling you a loved one has had a bad accident. It could also be an annoying sales person trying to get you to switch mobile phone providers.

Another good example is physical exercise. It is important to exercise regularly if you want to stay healthy. But it isn’t urgent. You feel like ‘you can always do it tomorrow’. Until you way 250 pounds, have diabetes and find yourself undergoing a very invasive stomach surgery and who knows what else. That is the difference.

Covey Time Management Model

So everything you do you label ‘important‘ or ‘not important‘ and ‘urgent‘ or ‘not urgent‘. This leads to the following model by Stephen Covey, with each activity falling into one of the four quadrants.

Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent

If an activity falls in this quadrant there’s no denying it. You are the person to do it and you must do it NOW. These activities consist of:

• Crises
• Pressing problems
• Deadline driven projects, meetings and preparations

Quadrant 2: Important but not Urgent

This is the category of activities like exercise; important but you have time to complete the activity before it is too late. Activities that fall into this category therefore must be planned. And when the time comes to do the activity, do not procrastinate! Activities in this category are activities like:

• Preparations
• Presentations
• Relationship building
• True recreation

Quadrant 3: Not Important but Urgent

In this quadrant there are urgent activities which do not have any real importance. This means these activities lend themselves perfectly for delegation to others (optionally, with you doing the important preparing work). Activities that tend to fall in quadrant 3 of the Stephen Covey time management model are:

• Interruptions
• Most phone-calls
• Most e-mail
• Most meetings
• Many popular activities

This quadrant is the eye-opener for many people. Because if you want to ‘look busy’ you tend to work in this quadrant a LOT. But if you are truly honest to yourself, you can probably skip about 90% of your daily email, phone calls and in most cases, meetings. Another tendency people have, is to interrupt you. Don’t let them; tell them every time your door is closed that they’ll have to wait. They’ll eventually only bother you when your door is open.

Quadrant 4: Not Important and not Urgent

Okay, let’s face it, we all spend time here. Watching television is one such very good example. Unless you can categorize it under ‘true recreation’ it is just killing time and you are not actually resting that much either. I would urge you to forget about these things all together. Just don’t do them. Trust me, the world won’t burn down around you when you don’t. I have tried it, and have successfully eliminated the following mostly useless activities from my life:

• Watching the news
• Reading the paper
• Reading my email 200 times a day
• Checking news sites every 15 minutes

How are those first two not important? Simple. I hear the big news from my colleagues whether I want to or not. When asked whether I heard about it, I just tell them no and they’ll react with amazement. They will start telling me the story all the more enthusiastically. This gives me the chance to listen to them, building a relationship (quadrant 1 activity!) by emphatically listening. They in turn feel good, while effectively simply acting as my news filter. Win-win!

Other activities that usually fall into this category are:

• General trivia, ‘busy work’
• Junk mail (forwards from friends for example)
• ‘Escape’ activities (e.g. reading news sites every 15 minutes)

More Stephen Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This article on time management is my interpretation of the model by Stephen Covey. The applications that I have described have worked for me very well and have generally led me to lead a more satisfying life. Stephen Covey is an expert on success. I highly recommend you read his book, it is a world wide bestseller and widely regarded as the best self-improvement book of all time:

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