Covey's quadrants vs. GTD workflow model

[mcogilvie]

As for things that are important to your students not being important to you...if you didn't have students, you wouldn't have a job...so I would say that things that are important to your students probably be should be important to you if your job is at all important to you..(omitted stuff)..Students may not come and go as quickly as customers, but the success of an institution does depend on the number of students enrolled, and if the professors are only concerned about themselves, the institution will not attract students as it might otherwise. Even if you are tenured, your department will not have the resources you might want for the research and projects you might want to do if you do not have students.

Please don't try to put words in my mouth. The only reference I made to students was a specific example of something that might have moved a bit faster had I not recently had surgery. The idea that professors are largely indifferent to their students is a myth. The concerns of faculty are not the same as those of students, but tend to be wider and more long-range. For instance, I could give all my students A's, and perhaps most of them would be happy. But some would not, and in the long run, it is in no one's best interest for me to do so.

To get back to GTD: as DA says, we mostly live inside our principles. They constrain our actions. I think that is mostly a good thing. I want to handle my commitments with integrity, not think each time about the net benefit to me. Perhaps we are saying much the same thing, but approach it very differently.

 

[Jacques]

To me, the most important insight of the Covey quadrants is that you must choose to make time proactively for QI actions that are important but not urgent.

(just joining the thread)

I think I concur with what you said.

I may refer to Covey at decision or process time, certainly not at Review time. I would not write actions or tasks within the quadrants, but rather comitted outcomes or agreed missions.

I use these definitions :

• Is important to me what's part of one my roles, or one of my agreed commitments.
• Is urgent what cannot be anymore done if it is not done now (ie this month, this week, today..).

With these :

Q1 is crisis : I must do, do all, do myself, do now till completion without any break !
Q2 is more mind like water-friendly : I can do, if I do I may just do a part (NA), or I may delegate.
Q3 : I may do Not, and say "No". If I do, it is not by compliance, but because it brings me a satisfaction (I am the only one who can judge).
Q4 : I do not do anything, but one : dump (collect, journalize..). Because time may come where there is a jump in urgency or importance, or both ! (activate)

Thus Covey's still help me :

• To answer yes or no, or this part at this time, to a new asked mission / commitment.
• To decide what can be differed, or delegated, and what cannot at process time.
• To narrow my lists to hotest (contexts lists, today on the plate) if they get longer than a card (or a PDA screen). This is still at process time.
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But ultimately, at review time, l sense and choose priority according to physical and emotional state and a short context list of NAs to activate, doable here and now.

Priorities cannot be hardcoded on paper. They're always relative, thus always evolving. Imho, that's one great observation made by David.

The purpose of GTD, as I see it, is to make me able to best answer that question at any moment without unecessary worry :

"And now, what I choose to do, and what I choose not to do now ?"

To be at ease with our review choices we need an easy and reliable system. To grow and keep it reliable, you need GTD process and habits. There is no magic quadrant recipe for these !

Covey is still a valuable time management tool. But GTD really is for managing actions

Jacques

 

[MikeC]

Jumping in on the Covey thing: Each work day for me is 10 hours (I know: Get a life--another subject). 20% of 10 hours is 2 hours. I block out that 2 hours on my Palm. During that 2 hour period I can work on Anything I want and without interruption. Hopefully, it meets the definition of Quad 2. I works best when I've decided in advance what that activity (ies) is. See: I'm full of HOPE!!

 

[Barry]

I love the 4 quadrant model on an academic level because it illustrates a very important concept in time management. But I think it has limited practical usefulness in terms of your day-to-day actions, other than just being aware of the general principle at a conceptual level when deciding what to do at a given moment.

What I mean is that even without the model, everyone already knows that quad 4 items are not worth doing and quad 1 items are going to be at the top of your priority list any way. Everyone instinctively knows that stuff that is both urgent and important just has to be your fucus right now and the model doesn't change that or even help us recognize it. Likewise, everyone knows what wasting time is (quad 4). The only place this model really enlightens us is in telling the difference between quad 2 and quad 3. In other words, it teaches us that the relative need to work on something is a product of 2 distinct factors (importance and urgency) and that we should not allow mere urgency to masquerade as importance. This is pretty simple, but it is actually an important and useful concept.

It's application is when you get a phone call or office visitor who just really needs something (trivial) right this minute, when in fact you were working on something far more important. Most people will let the urgent interruption sidetrack the important activity. In this case, urgency is masquerading as importance, and this is a very common problem in the modern workplace since many people recognize that if they want people to be responsive to them, they just have to become the squeeky wheel.

This is not to say that you should never take a phone call or help a colleague with some trivial matter just as a favor. Of course there is value in being responsive to colleagues and building relationships. But in these cases, the task has intangible importance that makes it legitimate to work on.

So when deciding what to do next from the NA list, just take a second to decide if something is really important or just masquerading as important because it is urgent. You don't want to be in a position where at the end of the year you handled everything that was urgent and nothing that was important. This concept will help you prioritize. But there is definitely no need to create a formal quadrant system. Think of it as a concept rather than a system.