First Things First: the planned and the unplanned

Why this matters

President Eisenhower's working line: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." The published matrix that came out of that line uses Urgent and Important as its two axes. The trouble: "important" is whatever a man can talk himself into. Under pressure, everything looks important. The honest test is sharper.

This chapter adopts a working substitution: in place of "important," use "planned." Planned means it contributes to a written SMART goal you've already set. Unplanned means it doesn't. The check is objective: look at your goal list. If the task isn't on it, the task isn't planned, no matter how urgent it feels. Once you have that test, the matrix becomes the triage tool Covey wanted it to be: Quadrant II (planned, not urgent) is where the work of your life happens; Quadrant III (urgent, unplanned) is the trap most men fall into; Quadrant IV is the waste.

What this chapter is

Once you have values, a mission, roles, and goals, you face the working problem: a hundred things compete for your next hour. Covey's Habit 3 (Put First Things First) and the published Eisenhower matrix both teach prioritization, but "important" is too subjective to use under pressure (a man can rationalize anything into important). This chapter adopts a sharper test: "planned" means contributing to a written SMART goal you've already set; everything else is "unplanned." Combined with the urgent / not urgent axis, the four-quadrant matrix becomes a working triage tool that you can apply in seconds.

How to practise it

A lesson walks the same seven steps every time. Read the intro, study the material, then drill it through Quick Fire, Matchup, Sequence, Flashcards, and the Mix capstone. Each step opens to the next; no choices to make in the middle of the work.