After reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, I felt that the third habit “Put First Things First” had the greatest impact on my life. In this article, I would like to share my thoughts about what the habit means to me and how has it impacted my day-to-day life.
What does Putting First Things First mean?
This habit deals mainly with time management. In short, it encourages us to prioritise things that bring value in the long term over other things that may seem urgent but when done, add little to no value. It splits up tasks into 4 main quadrants:
- Quadrant I: Tasks which are urgent & important, such as project deadlines
- Quadrant II: Tasks which are not urgent but important, such as strengthening relationships
- Quadrant III: Tasks which are urgent but not important, such as phone calls
- Quadrant IV: Tasks which are neither urgent nor important, such as watching TV
Just looking at the definition of each quadrant, we can roughly tell that to truly be effective, we have to place our focus on quadrants I & II. However, do we really focus the majority of our time in those quadrants. At the end of the chapter, the author, Stephen R. Covey recommends us to log down our time over a period of 3 days into a time management matrix. At the end of the activity, we’ll be able to tell where most of our time is spent.
What a Waste of My Time
Surprisingly, after completing this activity, I found that a huge portion of my time was focused on quadrants III & IV.
First off, my work environment was mainly comprised of quadrant I & III activities. I was either actively responding to emails & text messages from clients and colleagues (quadrant III) or being forced to put out fires throughout the project (quadrant I) to ensure we could meet the timeline. Having to keep alternating between these two quadrants, my days at work were constantly filled with urgency which eventually led to stress. Prolonged stress consequently led to burn out over time.
Outside of working hours, after being mentally exhausted by attending to urgent matters all day, I felt that I needed to rest & recuperate by watching TV or scrolling through social media (quadrant IV). Having a stressful work week was the perfect excuse for me to relax over the weekends as well by going out for shopping and food, or maybe play games with friends (quadrant IV).
Once I fully charged up from resting over the weekend, then the entire cycle begins again. Reflecting back on it now, I have wasted so much time doing the same thing over and over again. That’s the main reason I am really glad to have learn about “Habit 3: Putting First Things First” (although it seems so simple of a concept that anyone should know it through common sense).
Implementing the Habit
Learning this about myself was just the first step. The next thing for me to do was to manage my time properly, to use it as efficiently as possible to achieve my goals. As the saying goes “The foundation of a strong self comes from small acts of daily discipline”. Luckily, the book also shares some tips on how we can properly utilise these quadrants to better manage the use of our time.
The trick is to plan ahead, ideally we should take some time off each week to plan what are the important tasks that we should focus on. The reason behind this concept is simple, if we don’t plan ahead, then we will only do what needs to be done right now (high urgency). And if we do not have something specific planned, then we fall back to what is easy and comforting (low importance).
By planning ahead, we can think of what our goals are (e.g. to be a better leader), then plan tasks that can help us move one step closer towards them. Imagine just taking 1 step closer towards your goal each week, what would you have accomplish within a year?
The diagram on the right illustrates a simple planner using excel that we can utilise to plan our tasks for the upcoming week. To be clear, this plan is not fixed. There will be times that unforeseen events may change our schedules, and that is totally fine. It’s important to adapt to changes as they come, but remember to keep your head faced towards your goals.
Summary
I hope that you enjoyed this article, hopefully you have learnt a thing or two about time management. For those of you who have been feeling stuck for a while, I urge you to give this a try. Incorporating this habit in my daily life has tremendously improved the quality of my life and multiplied the efficiency in my areas of focus.