Back to Basics: Setting Priorities

There are only 24 hrs in a day. You can fill it up with meaningless little busy-work tasks, or you can do the big stuff first, then the smaller stuff, and finally fill in the spare moments with the useless stuff.

Sit down tonight before you go to bed and write down the three most important tasks you have to get done tomorrow. In the morning, tackle them one by one in order of importance.

Covey suggests you divide a piece of paper into four sections, drawing a line across and a line from top to bottom. Into each of those quadrants, you put your tasks according to whether they are:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important and Not Urgent
3. Not Important but Urgent
4. Not Important and Not Urgent

You’d like to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II, plugging away at tasks that are important with plenty of time to really get into them and do the best possible job. 

In the end, setting priorities is an exercise in self-knowledge. You need to know what tasks you’ll treat as a pleasure and which ones like torture, what tasks lead to your objectives and which ones lead you astray.