How to Create a Time Management Matrix that Keeps You Able to Achieve Your Goals

Most of us waste more time than we realize. Whatever your job, the majority of people prefer less urgent activities to more crucial ones.

We also spend a lot of time thinking about the big tasks we have to accomplish, which usually delays us until we have "more time."

Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower confirmed that we tend to focus on important and urgent matters, leading to a reaction that will do what needs to be done now rather than on important and non-urgent matters, which will be the basis for a more strategic approach depending on long-term goals.

We waste almost half of our time on tasks that may not benefit us in the long term. We must therefore find the opportunity to redirect our time to more valuable work.

There are no shortcuts for doing important work, but a strategy that helps you limit procrastination is the "time management matrix."

What Is the Time Management Matrix?

When your work is crowded with tasks, it is easy to become unaware of what is “important” and what is “urgent”, so one of these two words is used a lot in place of the other. The core of the time management matrix, however, highlights a significant gap between them. This matrix is a method to determine what you need to do and how to handle your obligations more consciously.

It is human nature to give priority in time to urgent tasks. When we realize the deadline is approaching, our interactive brain begins working. We dedicate all our attention to finishing work just because it is urgent. In return, we get a boost of the dopamine hormone that motivates us to work, but when its effect wears off, we realize that we have spent the entire day doing things that are not really important and that we will later see as a waste of time.

Stephen Covey, an American educator and entrepreneur, recognized the "urgency addiction" and developed the Covey time management matrix to help people distinguish between what is important and what is urgent.

How Does This Matrix Help You?

It depends on the fundamental principle that effective time management can help us achieve our goals, and in the end, success in almost everything involves time regulation.

It may seem like you don't have time to do everything, but there are simple ways to organize your time so you don't feel like you're running out of time. This matrix can be used as a tool to understand your priorities and goals, and it's particularly useful if you're experiencing distractions, wasting time, or feeling confused.

The time management matrix gives you the basis for your goals, giving you the ability to focus more on achieving them than just planning for them. When you adopt better time management habits in your personal and professional lives, you can reduce stress, produce better work, and even improve your job opportunities.

How to Create Your Time Management Matrix?

Now you know how this matrix can help you, so it's time to create one for you, and we should do it as follows: Draw four boxes, each with four words on the left and top sides: unimportant, important, urgent, and not urgent, and then write your activities in the right box and start working from there.

Create Your Quarters

Use the description below to see where you should put each of your activities:

The first quarter

Tasks in this quarter must include important and urgent matters that are somewhat rare and require your immediate attention. In the first quarter, it is almost certain that there will be immediate consequences if the tasks are not completed on time. These consequences may be a missed opportunity, a poor performance at work, or a poor assessment of your performance.

If your organization has a huge delivery date for a client and a project leader gets sick and stops working for a week, you and your team will have to put all your focus and energy into terminating the work with less guidance than usual. Or if a customer calls and is ready to buy the biggest deal your company has seen this year, this is one of the crucial moments that dictates that you stop anything else you do.

The second quarter

The tasks of the second quarter are important, but they are not necessarily urgent, or they may not require your immediate attention. If you feel that all your important tasks are also urgent, it means you have a backlog of important, long-delayed tasks on your list that are becoming urgent.

Although not urgent, the second-quarter tasks are important for your strategic and long-term goals at the personal and professional levels. These tasks leave a great impact. Improving work procedures, finalizing additional training, and building relationships are all examples of second-quarter tasks.

If you have the ability, allocate a large amount of uninterrupted time to work on urgent, unimportant matters. The longer you are engaged and working with complete focus, the better.

The third quarter

This quarter's tasks are those that you should delegate or automate whenever possible because they are urgent. They must be terminated on a specific date, but they are not necessary, for example, when your colleague asks you for help with their presentation tomorrow.

Although there is a deadline for this project, it is not as important to you as it is to him. Instead of taking a lot of time out of your day and tasks to help him with this project step by step, offer to help him proofread the project when he finishes it.

This is the kind of task that you should spend as little time as possible on, and it will often backfire on your work as it doesn't contribute much to your goal, isn't high on your priority list, and makes your daily life difficult.

The fourth quarter

The tasks of this quarter are neither urgent nor important, which means that they are not worth your time. You can consider this quarter a black hole into which you sink more and more as you spend more time on these tasks until you lose all your motivation and energy to focus on important matters.

The following activities are examples of unimportant and non urgent types of activities: browsing social media sites, watching unintended television, sorting spam, attending meetings that are irrelevant to your work, etc.

There are several tasks that you can include in the fourth quarter, and these hollow tasks are a waste of time, and we are often ashamed to spend so long on them, so writing them down and seeing them on paper would be a reminder to not do them too much.

Determine Your Priorities

Being able to determine the type of task means that you understand your priorities. The idea of Covey's time management matrix is to help us think about whether or not this task is helping us achieve our goals.

It is important to reorganize your list of tasks depending on the foregoing so that you can quickly identify tasks that require immediate and more decisive attention.

Exclude Distractions

Once you have identified important tasks, the next step is to find more time and space to work on them with a continuous focus, and you will have to manage your schedule strategically to devote most of your time to this type of task.

Consider taking advantage of time division to schedule structured sessions of deep engagement and limit time spent on unimportant things like managing email.

In Conclusion

Anti-distraction apps help make sure you're able to focus on your important tasks without allowing useless things to control your time or disturb you when you're trying to concentrate. They can also help you manage the biggest distractions, such as blocking specific sites or limiting your daily browsing that has nothing to do with work.