Brian Johnson breaks down Stephen Covey's four quadrants of time management, showing how to move from wasting time on unimportant stuff to doing work that actually matters. Quadrant 4 is the junk. Quadrant 2 is where your soul gets fed.
Hi, this is Brian with another mini chapter from A Philosopher's Notes. This one's called Quadrant 4 to Quadrant 2. Stephen Covey has a handy Dandy 4 quadrant model for effective self and time management. That's a key part of his third habit to put first things first. As you may know, the basic idea is that activities can be categorized as either urgent or not urgent and important or not important. And we can throw those possibilities into that little four quadrant model. Quadrant two is for the important but but not urgent. Goodness. It includes things like meditation, quality time with your family, working out, yoga, hiking, journaling, studying, etc. Basically stuff that renews your soul. Quadrant 4, on the other hand is for the not important and not urgent distractions and includes time wasting stuff like checking ESPN for the 100th time that day, my personal favorite. Or flipping aimlessly through the 2.43 million channels on TV. Or spending hours aimlessly surfing the Internet. Now I've noticed I tend to fall into quadrant 4 time wasting activities when I'm stressed or overwhelmed or avoiding something. And I've created a little game where I can try to catch myself when I'm stuck in Q4. That quadrant four. I see if I can swap that Q4 soul sucking activity for a Q2 sound soul nourishing one. It's quite cool. So for example, when I'm about to load the ESPN page to see the same updates from the last time I checked it 10 minutes ago, I can notice that and say aha. Nice try dude. You're burned out at the moment and need a little break. Yo, what's a cool cue too? You can rock. That would make you feel great rather than like a weenie. Oh yeah, good idea. Let's go for a hike. Now feel free to change up that internal monologue, but give it a shot if you're feeling it the next time you start your Q4 slide. There you go. Quadrant four distractions into quadrant two renewal activities. Really cool idea I've loved to implement in my life. Hope you enjoyed and have an awesome day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.
