Making A Habit Of....First Things First

This is the third in our new series of seven articles based around Steven R Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” We are looking at each of these habits in turn to show how they can be applied in the world of insight. 

• Important and urgent. This is an item where there isn’t much choice – it has to be done. However, better planning could perhaps reduce the amount of items within this category.
• Important but not urgent. If you spend all of your time and resources in fire-fighting, you never get to this category - until the task becomes urgent and moves into Category 1. This isn’t good for items that warrant more time and thought.
• Urgent but not important. You need to minimise the amount of time spent on these jobs. You could, however, prioritise them according to their financial value to the business. They are unlikely to be high value items – so you need to manage your resources and people’s expectations so that you don’t get too bogged down with them. You could even possibly find ways of getting people to do them themselves. For example, if your internal clients are looking for information or data, you could perhaps encourage them to become more self-sufficient in this area (for example, by extending subscriptions and providing tools and training, so that they can do it on a DIY basis).
• Not urgent or important. These include tasks that fall within your comfort zone, but which tend to be time wasters. You need to use basic time management and focus principles to group these items together and then complete them in batches at appropriate times. Alternatively, be ruthless and just cut them out altogether! Don’t waste your prime time and energy on them.