Some people work full time, they have spouse and kids, at the same time they are students and also do a lot of volunteer activities like helping their kids to sell cookies for the Girl Scouts, planting trees, go to walk for breast cancer or heart disease, serve communities in the events, or blogging daily in different languages, how these people can do these different time consuming activities?
In the program developing and management course we learned a concept from “First things First”a book by Roger and Rebecca Merrill. In the class we called this concept Quadrants. Look at the below matrix, there is 4 Quadrants, Quadrant 1 represents things that are both urgent and important, most professional people live in this Quadrant, they have to meet their deadlines for projects, meetings etc.Quadrant 2 includes activities that are important, but not urgent; this is the Quadrant of Quality. Here is the area of long term planning, empower others, increase skills, do community services etc.Quadrant 3 includes the things that are urgent but not important. The noise of urgent creates the illusion of importance. Doing others priorities, answering phone calls, chatting on-line and talking about the calories of the black tea or biscuit that we want to eat. Quadrant 4 is talking about things thoes are neither urgent nor important, this is the quadrant of waste: like excessive watching TV, some phone calls, doing nothing for survival since we are tired of swinging between Quadrant 1 and 3.Quadrant 4 is not survival, it is just like thinking we are recreated ourselves, but we don’t, living in this Quadrant helps to increase the incidence of obesity dramatically.
So what should we do?
with refusing living in Quadrant 4, and reducing the time of Quadrant 3 and add it to Quadrant 2 can reduce the pressure of Quadrant 1 and have a more creative and effective life. So let’s work on Quadrant 2, the Quadrant of Quality.
Note: Matrix image: the Matrix is in the book page 37, but I didn’t type it again I copid it from here
