The Urgent / Important Model

Quadrant I represents both “urgent and important” things. We need to spend time in quadrant I as we invariably land up in handling the pressing and sometimes unexpected matters like handling an irate client, visiting a friend who has just met with an accident, meeting a deadline and so on and so forth.

We can’t avoid this quadrant. Taking a step further we will say that we need to spend time in quadrant I. This is where we manage, where we produce, where we take quick decisions based on our experience and judgement. You can imagine what will happen if we ignore the activities in this quadrant.

The most important thing one must remember is that many important activities become urgent because of procrastination or because of lack of planning and preventive measures.

Quadrant II includes activities that are “important, but not urgent”. This is where everyone ought to be. Here is where we take both personal and professional aspects of life into consideration. Not only do we get our work done but we also work towards developing and enhancing our effectiveness in all aspects of life.

The more are we in this quadrant the more is our ability to do.

Ignoring the activities in this quadrant results in increasing the quadrant I activities. It creates stress, burnout, and crisis after crisis for the person involved. On the other hand, if we are in this quadrant most of the time, we do not have to get into quadrant I.

The 3 P’s - Planning, Preparation and Prevention – are the typical characteristics of this quadrant and they restrict many things from becoming urgent.

This is the quadrant of quality. This is also the quadrant of personal leadership.

Quadrant III is an illusory image of Quadrant I. Here the activities are “Urgent but not important”. The ironical thing about this quadrant is that the activities sound very important to us, but are usually important for someone else. Our delusional thinking also compels us to think that just because the things are urgent, they are important too.

Typical activities falling into this quadrant are, attending the drop-in visitors, many phone calls, needless meetings and brainstorming sessions.

Time Management

This is the quadrant of Deception.

Quadrant IV activities are those which are “neither important nor urgent”. No one should be there at all. Yet all of us spend considerable amount of time in this quadrant. What can be the reason?

Urgency being our principal paradigm of managing time we get mentally tired while continuously travelling between the quadrants I and III. We tend to call it recreation or the so-called “creative pause”. More than recreation, the activities in this quadrant can best be called as “time- pass”.

The typical activities here would be gossiping about colleagues in the office, watching and discussing the mindless T.V. soaps, reading light novels and so on.

Quadrant IV is nothing but deterioration. This quadrant is aptly named as “Quadrant of waste”.