First things first

I love Planners, To-Do Lists and Diaries. For some reason, I get a kick out of ticking off those little boxes after accomplishing a task or scheduled activity, and it brings me priceless peace at night to see a fully-checked-off list when I wind down with my diary to (over)think the day that was. It also gives me a chance to see my inefficiencies and (try to) correct those the next day.

One Sunday evening while I was mulling over my To-Dos for the coming week, my son peered over my shoulder as he always does during our ‘bedtime habit’ but for the first time, asked me to explain the matrix in front of us. The Urgent-Important Matrix is a tool I learned from Stephen Covey’s book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” way back when I first joined the work force fifteen years ago— my out-in-the-open magic trick to putting first things first—and something that my son has seen me do daily since he was a baby.

Without appearing too eager (but deep down, was only too giddy to walk him through it…oh have I been waiting for this moment!!), I described what it was all about while crossing my fingers that he will find it interesting too. As a mom, I know that that was a pivotal parenting moment and I wanted my son to take away an important lesson that many of us (myself included) took many years to learn.

Children nowadays face more distractions than we had growing up that keep them from doing things that bring the most value to their over-all development, so even a simple awareness of this Matrix will hopefully help them make better use of their time. Below is my attempt to make the concept usable for all parents and learn-able for school-aged kids.

Q1 Important & Urgent: Do First

Important and urgent tasks are those that are time-bound and critical to your child’s life and over-all well-being and must always be done first because not doing these will have negative consequences. For most school-aged kids, this can be summed up in one word: HOMEWORK. But this can also be other important tasks like those assigned by dad or mom.

For us parents, what goes into our Firsts bucket will depend on our goals and life stage. This can be domestic crises like tending to the needs of a crying baby, a last-minute revision to an important pitch deck, doing an urgent errand for your beloved husband as an act of service, or rushing to the school clinic to pick up your sick child.

So if a task is critical to your life and well-being, and not doing it ASAP will have a negative consequence, plus there is no other person who can accomplish the task except you, then by all means, you should drop everything and do that task first.

Q2 Important but Not Urgent: Plan for it

Now there are activities that will impact your child’s long term goals and must be incorporated into his schedule, one way or another. This may include improving innate talent and skills, his sports and hobbies (For us, this would be golf, art, math training, and piano lessons), family time, play dates, reading, worship. In the same way for us parents, these are tasks that we must do to improve our effectiveness as individuals, as parents, spouses, employees or business owners.

Ideally, after we finish tasks in Quadrant 1, this is where we should be spending the most time in. As these tasks are non-urgent, we will need to slate these important activities into our schedule for it to be done, otherwise, we will get too preoccupied by other seemingly urgent matters. In reality, tasks in this quadrant are the most prone to procrastination because there is no immediate consequence to deferring it to a later time.

Q3 Urgent but Not Important: Delegate

Let’s face it. The reality is, we all co-exist with other people who also have their own personal firsts and agendas, and chances are, we will get bombarded by other people’s minor issues or needless interruptions. It can take the form of unnecessary reports and irrelevant meetings, or all the time spent on responding to emails and messages.

For our children, this will depend on your or your child’s goals. In our home, our eight-year-old son’s foremost goal is to be an obedient and God-fearing boy, excel in school and his chosen extra-curricular activities, so tasks that won’t have an impact to this ‘end-in-mind’ ideally should fall in this Q3 bucket. But it’s not always the case. Our son is a bit obsessive-compulsive about sorting and he can spend hours organising his toys and books, according to size, type and color, because he just “needs to fix the mess” even if it meant staying up later than usual on a school night. When you think about it, isn’t that always the case with the urgent but not important stuff? On the surface, it seems like a “need” that “can’t wait” but in reality, we can always defer those activities to the weekend or free days. In the mean time, on school days, it will be best to delegate time-consuming house chores to be able to spend more time in Q1 or Q2.

So the next time we are in Q1 or Q2 doing things that matter, maybe it’s best to turn off our mobile phone or at least keep it in silent mode? After all, do we really need to respond immediately? Or the next time we remember an “urgent” task such as a grocery item that we forgot to buy, maybe we can send a representative on our behalf or delegate the task to somebody we trust enough to get that task done?

Q4 Not Urgent & Not Important: Eliminate Moderate

Kids being kids, this quadrant is probably where they spend the most time in – either playing Minecraft or Fortnight, watching You Tube or Netflix, flipping bottles to be the next “Dude Perfect.” While there is nothing wrong with ‘chillaxing’ as my son would call this precious, highly-anticipated free time, unregulated time spent here would basically mean that he accomplishes nothing else. So it may be wise to limit the time spent here and to move this time further down towards the end of day to make sure that the more important things are done first. Come to think of it, we adults can actually do the same. 😉

Now I know it’s easier said than done but it’s a life lesson that I feel we all must learn (or re-learn) if we want to prioritize our firsts. Life is really like the jar in the analogy of big rocks vs small rocks. If we fill up our schedule with the small, unimportant tasks, there is no way we will ever have time to do the things that matter. Tasks in Quadrants 1 and 2 are our rocks, Tasks in Quadrant 3 are the pebbles, and Tasks in Quadrant 4 are the sand. It’s really about knowing our firsts and dedicating our PRIME TIME on those. Every day. After all, whatever we spend the most time doing become our habits and we know our habits (good or bad) will define our life. Might as well be deliberate about where our time goes, right? That’s why I love Planners, To-Do Lists and Diaries. 😉

For those who are unfamiliar with the analogy of big rocks vs. small rocks, watch this: