Time Management Tips Series | Stephen Covey Influence
What I learned about time management from Stephen Covey…
Stephen Covey learned from a college professor in the 1920′s a very valuable idea about time management. The idea that every action we take is either:
- Important or Not Important
- Urgent or Not Urgent
Stay with me, because I know what you’re thinking right about now. Duh… but simple ideas are always the most profound and always the most overlooked and underestimated.
Let’s break down what this idea reveals a little further starting with the first category.
Important Actions that we take always have the following attributes:
Significant impact on your plan
Contributes to your vision
Contributes to your mission
Contributes to your values
Contributes to your objectives
Contributes to your strategies
Contributes to your high priority goals
This is enlightening stuff, because if the actions that you have labeled Important in your business and life don’t have the above attributes, it may be time to re-evaluate them in order to manage your time better.
Writing down our goals and the action steps to reach them is only the beginning, because we must follow through with labeling our actions as either “important”, “not important”, “urgent”, or “not urgent”.
Stay tuned for the breakdown of the second action category known as “Not Important”.
Breaking down your day makes it easy to see which tasks are true priority and before you know it you have achieved so much more than you ever thought in a 24-hour period.
