The Only Thing You Need To Remember About The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The most important thing you can do in your career relating to this simple two-by-two matrix is to do some Quadrant 2 stuff (not urgent but important) every day. At least 10% of your day needs to be devoted to this important but not urgent stuff. Ideally, you're spending 30% of every day on this.

You never have to worry about the tasks in Quadrant 1 (the urgent and important tasks). You'll always have to take care of them.

You have to - as much as you can - eliminate the Quadrant 4 tasks (not urgent and not important). Just say no to Facebook. Shut them off.. They're a time suck. Mark Zuckerberg has built a $100 billion empire off our inability to stop doing Quadrant 4 stuff!

You also need to severely restrict the Quadrant 3 stuff (urgent and not important). Most of us don't realize how much of this stuff we do every day and we think it's important when it's really not. With better awareness and better planning, you can really cut this stuff down.

Only, guess what? You're like a hamster on the wheel. You'll never clear up time on your schedule. You'll always be drinking from the firehose on these urgent tasks.

In fact, things in business since the 7 Habits book was published in 1989 have only made us more focused on Urgent stuff. Think about it. Email, the Internet, Cell Phones, Twitter. Back in 1989, people used to pack up at 5pm on Friday and be gone until Monday morning at 9am. Now, we're always connected and ready to respond to the latest issue.

If you simply spend 30 minutes at the beginning of each week thinking about these 4 quadrants and what you want to spend your time on in the coming week, you will be 10x more productive than you usually are.

What you'll quickly realize is that you've only been spending time on urgent tasks each week. It's a constant fire-drill. You're simply trying to get one thing off your plate, so you can breathe for half a second and get to the next emergency to get off your plate.

If someone stopped you and asked you whether the way you're spending your time on these urgent tasks is helping you to get to your long-term goal (whatever that is) of, for example, starting your own company, getting into a new industry, or reaching your next big job promotion, you'd probably say: "No, but I just need to get this stuff done to clear up time on my schedule so that I can do those things."

Quadrant 4: Not Urgent - Not Important. These things we do because we feel like we're tired and need a break. It's watching a mindless TV show at the end of the day. It's checking and rechecking Facebook and Twitter during the day, because we think we might miss something. It mind be mindlessly eating potato chips, even though we're not hungry. We prioritize these things in the moment and obviously derive some pleasure from them, but they are really not urgent or important. Yet, we'd be amazed how much time we waste in a given week on these tasks.