Where are you in Covey's 4 Quadrants?

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian with another optimal living 101 video. This one's on Stephen Covey's four quadrant model of time management. My question for you is, where are you in Covey's four quadrants? We're going to get to those four quadrants in a moment. But first, seven habits of highly effective people. Stephen Covey, amazing guy. Habit number one, be proactive, not reactive. Become response able. Able to choose your response to any given situation. Very good. Habit number two, begin with the end in mind. Once you take more control of your mind, you ask yourself, well, what do I want? What's my ideal outcome? Everything is created twice, he says. Once in your imagination, then in reality. Then when you've gotten clarity on what you want in your life, you've set effective goals, you exercise, hopefully. Habit number three, to put first things first. Covey wrote a whole book on this as well. In addition to the seven habits called First Things First. We're going to talk about that today. Now, Goethe tells us things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. We've got to pay attention to what our priorities are. Then we've got to remember to put first things first. Now, Stephen Covey, brilliant guy, came up with a handy dandy four quadrant model. Four quadrants mapped over whether it's urgent or not urgent and whether it's important or not important. So is this stuff we're doing urgent or is it not urgent, important or not important? Quadrant number one, it's urgent and it's important. These are basically fire drills, deadline after deadline. It's urgent and it's important. It's got to get done. Now the second quadrant we're going to talk about in a second is not urgent but important. Very, very important to spend time here. The third quadrant is urgent and not important. It's urgent, not important. These are interruptions that happen throughout our days, right? Maybe it's email that we're getting or someone stepping into our office. If we exclusively focus in quadrant one, urgent and important, we're in fire drill mode. Deadlines, we're going to have burnout. Now, if we're in quadrant three, we're constantly getting interrupted, constantly distracting ourselves with urgent, not that important emails. For example, we're in short term focus, not very fun. Now, quadrant number four is not urgent and not important. Not urgent, not important, not a good place to play. That is called time wasting activity that leads to the dreaded eek sauce and you're going to get fired and you're probably depressed if you're spending a lot of time in quadrant four. This stuff isn't urgent, it's not important. For me, it's, oops, just checked ESPN for the thousandth time today. Not quite that many, but you get the idea. Or Google News or email or whatever, right? Time wasters. Now what we want to do is we want to identify when we spend time here and we want to see if we can shift it to quadrant two. Quadrant two is where it's at. Not urgent like the fire drill, but it is important. Not urgent, but important. What's that like? Well, that's like meditation and exercise and time with your family and walking and reading and insert your favorite top 10 or 25 quadrant 2 activities here. That when we spend enough time in quadrant two, we tend to get the right balance. We've restored ourselves, we're coming from a healthy place and we're experiencing more levels of happiness. Really powerful stuff. Stephen Covey's seventh habit is sharpening the saw. And he talks about this guy who's in a forest sawing down a tree, right? He's sawing and he's sawing and he's sawing and he's sawing and he's sawing and this other guy's watching him and he's like, hey, you know, I think you might want to sharpen that saw. And the guy looks at him and says, I'm way too busy to take the time to sharpen this saw. Now obviously he was using a dull blade and it wasn't very effective. If we're spending all of our time here, we tend to get burned out. And then we distract ourselves here, here in time wasting activities. And we eat poorly. The sugar and the salt and all those things become more appealing. So what we want to do is invest more energy into quadrant number two. That's sharpening the saw and building a chainsaw. And you do that through the very simple habits that I call fundamentals that we talk about all the time. Where you're exercising, you're meditating, you're eating well, you're spending time with your family, you're taking care of yourself, you're nourishing yourself. Now what I recommend you do and what I do is I identify these time wasting quadrant four activities. Make a list. What are your top few things? I mentioned mine. Checking the news again, checking email all the time or ESPN or whatever. Identify these and notice when you either want to go into this or you are in it and see if you can step back and then shift to a Quadrant two activity. It's a really fun game. You're wasting time in Quadrant four. Shift into Quadrant two. Make that a habit. Become more aware when you're here and see if you can shift there. That is a quick look at Stephen Covey's Handy Dandy four Quadrant model. Where are you in Covey's four Quadrants? Where do you find yourself spending time? What did you get out of this video that you can apply to your life starting? I hope you got something meaningful and look forward to sharing more with you soon. Remember, be proactive. Begin with the end of mind. Put first things first. Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. Rock this model. Whatever else you use, we're going to talk a lot more about effective action steps. I'm preparing for my action class now that we've set some meaningful goals and I'll keep on sharing videos like this on taking effective action to help you create awesome success in 2013. More soon. I'll put a link below to the classes and all that good stuff. Have another awesome day. See ya.