Stephen Covey died last week. He pioneered the business self-help genre with the 1989 publication of his mega-hit book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People."

When I saw he died, I got a little panic-stricken because I couldn't remember a single one of the seven habits.

That ...

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...

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 min...

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.

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....