Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

I got a chance to listen  to a successful entrepreneur and what  he shared during the training is extremely important and vital and can make a big difference between being successful and an average mediocre person. He asked us to do a matrix of urgent and important.

 


  Everything you do fits into one of four categories determined by your own values and circumstances:

•     Important and urgent — fighting daily fires. Most people spend here much of their time. What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. Try to minimize the amount of tasks here and complete them as soon as possible.

•     Important but not urgent — this is the "big picture", strategic plans. This is where you need to spend quality time.

•      Not important but urgent — these are the tasks with near deadlines but not relevant to your own goals. Delegate them and give them as little time as possible.

•      Not important and not urgent — this is where you waste your time. Try to minimize, or trash them. Examples: Web browsing.

The difference between someone who is successful and the one is not depends on which quadrant they spend most of their time in.

Let us focus on WIN.

WIN stands for What’s Important Now? Not what was important…last week, last month, last quarter or last year.

Use your best thinking and intuition to determine and then implement the things you should be doing now.

I always understood this intuitively and if you examine your day you usually will find all 4 quadrants at work. But even if you understand it and recognize your tasks as important and urgent, how do I profit from the matrix? ;) How can I make practical changes to get better in my productivity?

The value lies mainly in the awareness of what is important and what not. And then in moving more and more into Quadrant 1 (important and urgent) and with all the rest into "The Zone" (Quadrant 2): into what is important but not yet urgent.

If you do this, you will master time-management and produce not only good results but also balance. Success will be much likelier and seem more natural and effortless. Someone who is good in time-management is not someone who is constantly managing the tasks in stress. In fact that is definitely a bad time-manager, since he is constantly in quadrant 1 and possibly 3. It may be important, but it is urgent for sure. That is bad time-management and the "cure" is in quadrant 2 – The Zone . Let us focus more of our activities towards Quadrant-2.