Schedule Your Priorities

From Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon and Schuster, 1989), Habit 3, “Put First Things First,” p. 161, in the “Quadrant II Focus” criterion within “The Quadrant II Tool.” The line is italicized in the print original.

For Covey, priorities is not shorthand for the day’s to-do list ranked by urgency. Habit 3 sorts activities on two axes (urgent or not, important or not) and argues that the consequential quadrant is the second: important and not urgent. Prevention, relationship-building, planning, exercise, and learning new skills live there. His complaint against the third-generation planning tools popular in 1989 (A/B/C ranking, daily appointment books) is that they only ordered whatever already filled the day, which kept their users stuck in the urgent quadrant. The recommendation that follows is to plan in weeks rather than days, seating Quadrant II goals on the calendar first and letting the urgent matters fit around them.