Yesterday as I was talking about expecting the unexpected, and kept mentioning making sure that when we have unexpected interruptions that we respond to them when they are important and urgent, it reminded me of one of the classic little booklets I’ve read on time and really life management titled Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent. In the book Charles Hummel points out that in life events come in four different types, which he divided into four different quadrants: Quadrant I: urgent and important; Quadrant II: not urgent and important; Quadrant III urgent but not important; and Quadrant IV: not urgent and not important. Hummel contended that in order to overcome the tyranny of the urgent, which would often mean succumbing to Quadrant III activities those things that are urgent but not important, one must invest a great deal of intentional planning and time in Quadrant II activities.
If you think about it matters that are not urgent, but important include all kinds of things that develop us as people whether at the physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual level. For example, I am engaging in a Quadrant II activity right now. Writing this blog is important. When I complete this post, I will have written more than 17,000 words about leadership in the past seventeen days! I will have gathered my thoughts, done research, reflected on what it means to be a leader, and passed on helpful insights to you who take the time to read them each day. These are important matters, but they are not urgent. I won’t get paid for writing these posts. If I “forget” to write them I suffer no penalty. No one will scream at me, or tug at me. On the other hand, if I fail to take the time each day to stop, think, reflect, and then write these posts I miss out on the opportunity to focus my thoughts on leadership, and thus grow as a leader. I also take away your opportunity to grow as leaders.
On the other hand, the Quadrant III matters of life break the silence of our Quadrant II times through the ringing of a telephone, the “ding” of a text message or e-mail coming to our inbox. When Hummel wrote The Tyranny of the Urgent back in 1967, he pointed to the telephone as the primary culprit in Quadrant III. He noted that so often when the phone rings we feel obligated both to answer it AND to respond in the affirmative with the requests that come from the callers. That’s what I was talking about yesterday when I mentioned that when I first started in the ministry, I felt that when someone called or stopped by my study, I felt obligated to respond. It was Hummel’s Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent that helped me to see that urgent demands need to be assessed and then assigned to Quadrant I or Quadrant III. Matters that are truly urgent AND important, must be addressed. It’s the matters, which are urgent BUT NOT important which must be dismissed.
It isn’t easy to say, “No,” to any urgent request whether important or not. That’s why we tend to rob Quadrant II time from our lives. Our exercise equipment won’t scream at us to use it. The latest business journal or book sits silently on our night stand or in our computer waiting “patiently” for us to read them. As much as we need to invest time with God, He will not yell for us to invest time with Him in prayer. In the same way, if we’re married, our spouses may or may not remind us of how important it is for us to invest time with them. When it comes to time and money we can only do two things with each: 1) spend them; or 2) invest them. When we spend time and money they are gone. We will never see any return from them. But when we invest time and money, over time they give us returns on the investment. I am already experiencing a return on my time investment in writing these posts. My leadership skills are improving. I think more about leading effectively all the time, and as a result I’m becoming a more effective leader on a daily basis.
Some have already asked me, “Do you have the time to write a DAILY blog with all you have going on?” The short answer is, “No. I don’t HAVE the time. I have to carve out the time.” One of the key differences when it comes to time and money is while each of us may make and have vastly different amounts of money, each of us has exactly the same amount of time: 24 hours each day. How we use those 24 hours makes all the difference. For this season in my life, I have committed to writing a daily post on leadership. I may find that I need to make that a weekly invest over time, but for now, even if no one reads what I’m writing, the return on investment for me is worth it.
As I was writing this post I had an instant message “ding,” a phone call from Nancy, and a second phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I nearly laughed out loud. What a confirmation that interruptions come to all of us, and that if we don’t have a filter, we will fritter away our time. Both the instant message and phone call from Nancy fell into Quadrant I, so I took a moment away from my writing to respond to each. I answered the second phone call, because I was expecting an important call from a person at a business that I hadn’t yet spoken to over the phone, and I couldn’t remember the number he gave me in his latest e-mail. After about ten seconds I realized it wasn’t the person I was expecting, and while I DID want to talk to the person on the line, it wasn’t a good time, so I asked if I could call back later. He said, “Yes,” so I moved that Quadrant I call, to my to do list, and will schedule it for tomorrow, at my convenience. That’s the blessing of filtering as many things as possible through the grid of the four quadrants.
You may have noticed that I didn’t mention Quadrant IV yet, those matters that are neither urgent nor important. I can sum up that quadrant in my life in two letters: TV. For some it’s spelled: video games. I’m not saying we ought never to spend time in this area, but that we must be extremely cautious in doing so, because when we say, “I’m just going to sit down and play a game or two, or watch a few minutes of television,” it is almost never a game or two, or a few minutes. We often invest our time in minutes and spend it in hours!
Here’s to leading better by filtering our time and thus our lives through the grid of the four quadrants–today!