While Habit 1 empowers you to create your own paradigms, and Habit 2 explains how to translate that paradigm into a principle-centered mission statement to direct your life — the first creation — Habit 3 explores how to translate that into day-to-day choices, the second creation.
Habit 2 discussed personal leadership, climbing to the top of the tree and making sure you’re in the right jungle; Habit 3 discusses self-management, leading the effort on the ground to hack your way through the underbrush and reach your destination.
We mentioned the four unique human endowments in Habit 1: self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and independent will. You used self-awareness to take notice of your paradigms, your conscience to decide how you want to change or improve them, and your imagination to develop new paradigms. Habit 3 exercises your independent will, that powerful ability to be proactive and decide how you act rather than simply reacting to external forces.
In order to use your independent will to effectively achieve mission statement and ultimate goals, you need the proper tools of time management. Over time, four generations of time management techniques have emerged.
The first iteration of time management tools focuses on gathering all the varied tasks and to-dos into checklists and Post-It notes. The main weakness of notes and checklists is that by lumping everything onto the same list, you’re not prioritizing tasks or assessing how (or whether) they contribute to your values and goals.
The first-generation paradigm causes you to react to any task or demand that external forces throw in front of you. This is the easiest approach because you simply take things as they come — just add it to the list! — but your effort produces few substantive results and doesn’t empower you to create your own path. Furthermore, if you feel that all you can do is react to external forces, then you don’t feel responsible for the results.
People who use first-generation time management tend to feel little control and self-esteem, and are typically seen as irresponsible and undependable.
The second generation of time management takes things a step further by taking all the to-dos on your checklists and organizing them into a schedule. People who follow the second-generation method are schedule oriented and show up to commitments when they’re supposed to, so they appear more responsible than first-generation time managers.
However, calendars and planners still have no process for weighting different activities based on how they contribute to priorities and goals, so this approach produces few important results.
The third generation builds on the second generation’s scheduling techniques by adding prioritization through clarifying your values and setting long- and short-term goals. With this method, you assess your to-dos, determine how each one fits into your goals and values, and schedule them accordingly.
Additionally, third-generation time management incorporates daily planning to schedule the most important asks into each day. But planning in the narrow parameters of a single day keeps the focus on urgent tasks, not all of which are important (we’ll talk more about balancing urgency and importance in the next section).
Daily planning also easily lends itself to over-scheduling, which is often frustrating and unrealistic; say you schedule your day practically down to the minute, including a 15-minute phone call with an old friend, but when you start talking to your friend, you discover she’s been dealing with some tragic news and you can’t possibly cut her off after 15 minutes simply to keep to your schedule.
Goal setting and daily planning fail to allow enough flexibility in your highly scheduled day to respond to unexpected events and opportunities that contribute to your principles and goals. In particular, opportunities to build relationships and have spontaneous experiences — both of which add to quality of life — tend to suffer in this efficiency-first, time-controlled model. This rigidity can be enough to turn people away from the third generation and back to the first or second generation tools.
Whereas the third generation strictly manages time, the fourth generation is about managing yourself so that you can actively decide which tasks will have the most value in your life and adjust accordingly as things come up. The fourth-generation approach involves planning on a weekly basis rather than a daily schedule, which gives you a broader lens and better context to schedule your priorities instead of prioritizing your schedule.
The flexibility built into this method empowers you to mold your time to fit your values, while also helping create more realistic expectations of your time; as you accomplish those tasks that move you toward your goals, your satisfaction with yourself and your life will increase. Effective people use the fourth-generation approach, keeping their focus on the activities that keep them on the path to realizing their personal mission statement.
Take a moment to think about your life and your goals. What are some things that you could do — but aren’t doing — that would significantly benefit your life and get your closer to achieving your goals? This is an important task, and one that you’re neglecting.
All tasks can be categorized based on their urgency and importance: An activity can be one (either urgent or important), both, or neither. Urgent matters are time sensitive, and they tend to grab your attention; this can be something as simple as a ringing phone. Important matters contribute toward your goals, values, and personal mission statement. We react to urgent matters, while important tasks that are not urgent require us to be proactive.
Picture a square divided into four quadrants: One axis measures whether or not something is urgent, and the other measures whether or not it’s important.
Urgent
Not Urgent
Important
Quadrant I
Urgent and Important
Quadrant II
Not Urgent, but Important
Not Important
Quadrant III
Urgent but Not Important
Quadrant IV
Neither Urgent nor Important
Quadrant I is urgent and important. Crises and problems live here, and life inevitably throws some Quadrant I tasks at all of us. However, some people seem to spend all their time in Quadrant I, constantly putting out fires and feeling like they never have time or energy to tackle anything that’s not urgent; in need of respite, they occasionally escape to the more leisurely Quadrant IV, where things are neither urgent nor important. The catch is that the more time you spend in Quadrant I, the more you will be stuck there, because you don’t have time to do the maintenance and preventive measures that help avoid crises.
Quadrant III is urgent, but not important. These kinds of activities can eat up your precious time and energy, without giving much value back to your life. Some people don’t even realize that these matters are not important, assuming that urgency implies importance; but the urgency is often dictated by other people’s priorities and expectations — what other people tell you must get done — rather than your own goals and values.
Quadrant IV is neither urgent nor important. These are things you may do purely for enjoyment, or out of confusion about what’s truly important. Quadrants III and IV are irresponsible uses of your time, because they contribute nothing toward your life, and effective people tend to avoid these activities.
Quadrant II is not urgent, but important. This is where effective people focus their time and energy, and the discipline to prioritize these tasks is key to self-management and achieving your personal mission. Quadrant II includes activities that could easily be put off for their lack of apparent urgency, but which will greatly benefit your life in the long term if you invest the time in them; they include developing relationships, defining your personal mission statement, exercising, and performing preventive maintenance (e.g. oil changes for your car, health check-ups, flossing, or home maintenance).
Effective people are proactive and understand the value of investing their time and energy into Quadrant II activities. Effective people respond to opportunities to do what’s important, instead of reacting to urgent problems. When things come up, it’s easier to determine what’s important and what isn’t once you’ve defined your goals and personal mission statement.
Shifting From Quadrant I to Quadrant II
Covey asked several shopping center managers what one thing could they could do that would improve their businesses. They all responded that building better relationships with their tenants — the store owners in their shopping centers — would have a tremendous impact. However, they were so consumed with meetings and reports and other urgent matters that they were only spending about 5 percent of their time developing these relationships.
Quadrant I was eating up so much of the managers’ time, they hardly had any left for the Quadrant II relationship-building that they felt would greatly benefit them. The store owners were overburdened themselves with employment, cost, and inventory issues; on top of that, they only seemed to hear from the shopping center managers when something was wrong or urgent, leading to a strained relationship.
The shopping center managers decided to take a proactive step and dedicate significantly more time to building relationships with tenants. After about a year and a half, the managers were spending about 20 percent of their time working with tenants, and in that process the managers had become better at listening and consulting the store owners so that their interactions were more positive and productive. As a result, everyone benefitted: The store owners implemented new skills and ideas that boosted sales, which increased the shopping center managers’ lease revenues and interest from potential tenants.
When you begin shifting your attention to Quadrant II, at first you’ll only be able to take time from the unimportant Quadrant III and IV activities. You’ll still need to attend to the urgent and important tasks in Quadrant I, but those will gradually shrink as you put more effort into Quadrant II preventive activities. If you want to make time for Quadrant II priorities, you’ll have to say “no” to unimportant tasks — even when they appear urgent.
Certain activities may be very appealing or contribute to worthwhile causes, but are not important in contributing toward your personal goals; these will be some of the hardest things to say “no” to. But your time and energy are finite, so you always have to say “no” to some things: If you don’t make a point of saying “no” to the unimportant tasks, then you’ll be saying “no” to the important ones.
Keeping your focus on Quadrant II is a paradigm that you can develop from a principle center; having a clear sense of your mission, principles, and values, will make it easier to say “no” to the unimportant because you’ll know you’re making room for the important. If you’re centered on something external like your spouse, work, money, or pleasure, you’ll get stuck in a cycle of reacting to outside factors — and their supposedly urgent matters — in Quadrants I and III.
Like any paradigm shift, developing a Quadrant II paradigm will take time, practice, and deliberate effort. Start by planning out one week according to the Quadrant II-focused, fourth-generation method.
Just as you did for your personal mission statement, identify the various roles you have in the personal, professional, and leisure areas of your life; this will help you keep your focus and priorities balanced and avoid neglecting any particular area of your life and responsibilities. In this exercise, only focus on roles that are applicable for the next week.
In addition to your role as an individual, list one or more roles you have in your family (e.g. spouse, mother, daughter, sister, aunt), a few roles in your work life (e.g. executive producer, vice president of content, department manager), and one or more roles you have in your community or leisure activities (e.g. church elder, volunteer, recreational volleyball team captain).
Think about one or two important results you’d like to achieve for each role within the next week. These goals should contribute to the longer-term, big-picture goals in your personal mission statement, and at least some of them should fall into Quadrant II. If you haven’t created your personal mission statement yet, be mindful to set these goals with a general focus on what’s important to you in the long term.
Now that you have a list of goals to accomplish in the next week, start scheduling them. Some goals might be time-sensitive, or only doable during business or weekend hours; with this in mind, assign a day (or take it a step further and create an appointment time) to achieve each goal. As you’re scheduling out your week, be sure to check your calendar for prior commitments, assess how they fit into your goals, and decide whether to keep, reschedule, or cancel them.
As you move through your week, begin each day by reviewing what’s on that day’s agenda and remembering why these activities are important for your overall goals. When things come up unexpectedly, address them according to your goals and scheduled priorities. Third generation-style daily planning can help you make order of your day, and it will be a more effective use of the method when it’s in the context of your weekly schedule.
When you’ve scheduled all of your goals for the week, add a chunk of time for renewing and revitalizing activities that we’ll discuss in Habit 7. Even with all of these goals and activities scheduled, your week should still have ample spaces of open, unscheduled time. This is critical: It gives you the flexibility to respond to unexpected events and enjoy spontaneous moments, which creates a higher quality of life and makes this approach sustainable.
How do you make sure you have time for your high-priority, Quadrant II goals, while also leaving room in your schedule for the unexpected? Delegate.
Some people resist delegating tasks to other people because of the up-front time investment: You have to explain what needs to be done and how to do it, and the other person might not do as good a job as you could’ve done.
But delegating tasks that can be performed by someone else is the essence of a Quadrant II activity: instead of reacting to the urgent need to just get a task done, you’re making a short-term investment that frees you up in the long term to spend your time and energy on more important and valuable activities. In addition, both people benefit because the delegator gains more time and the person being delegated to gains knowledge and experience.
Delegation creates the difference between a producer and a manager; a producer does whatever’s needed to achieve a result, while a manager capitalizes on people and systems to increase production capability. When a producer spends one hour on a task, she gets one unit of results, but when a manager spends one hour of effort she can create tens or hundreds of units of results, depending upon the size of the team she’s managing.
There are two forms of delegation: gofer delegation, and stewardship delegation. One is far superior than the other.
The first is gofer delegation — when a manager simply instructs her team members to “go for this, go for that.” Gofer delegation is not very effective because the manager is essentially micromanaging her team, focusing on the methods they use rather than the results they achieve. In addition, gofer delegation doesn’t free up the manager to attend to other tasks if she is busy supervising every action her team takes.
A manager with a gofer delegation paradigm are hands-on and may feel very involved, but her hovering doesn’t give her team members space to develop any personal investment in the results. If your boss is telling you every step to take and monitoring every move, you’ll probably get to the point where you’re just going through the motions to appease her. In contrast, if your boss empowers you to handle a task or project and says that she trusts you to decide how to accomplish it, you’re more likely to feel responsible for the results.
The second approach in the example above is stewardship delegation. Stewardship delegation focuses on the results instead of the methods, giving team members the freedom to choose their approach and have a greater stake in the results. This requires managers to trust their employees, and to allow time for employees’ learning curve to reach that level of trust.
Effective stewardship delegation requires managers to clearly communicate her expectations in five areas:
When using stewardship delegation, adapt your approach to the person and situation. If you’re delegating to an immature person, narrow the results and provide more guidelines, resources, accountability check-ins, and consequences. If you’re delegating to a more mature person, you can give her a larger number or more difficult results to achieve while offering fewer guidelines and check-ins.
Habit 3 offers many methods to help you work toward your personal mission statement amid the demands of daily life. Follow the steps below to start implementing this habit.