(2012-07-03) Rao Not Important Not Urgent Tasks

Venkatesh Rao asks: In StephenCovey’s famous important/urgent 2×2 diagram, why is the Not Important/Not Urgent quadrant even there (other than for geometric completeness)? If you’ve always got things going on, the other three quadrants always trump the NI/NU quadrant after all, so do things in it ever get done? Do they need to? (Time Management)

*I claim that the critical NI/NU stuff is stuff that usually only gets done when it moves to one of the other quadrants.

Three Examples of Jumps:

• An example of NI/NU jumping to NI/U is making a will. (Personal Finance)
• An example of a jump from NI/NU to I/U is a slovenly and unsuccessful screenwriter who spends all his time being unshaven and smelly and living off pizza and beer. His face is riddled with acne and he has BO. Then one day he gets a call from Steven Spielberg expressing interest in one of his scripts and asking for a meeting the following week.
• For an example of NI/NU jumping to I/NU, consider a workaholic who neglects his health and works 100-hour weeks throughout his twenties. Assume he was healthy and fit at 22, leaving college. At some point, he faces diminishing returns from the obsessive workaholism, gains weight, loses endurance and in general, begins to falter. At this point, investing in health, which was previously NI/NU when he was living off a youthful reserve of robust health, becomes important. It is now the BottleNeck preventing him from functioning at the next level.

The key to processing the NI/NU quadrant is to separate the potentially important and/or urgent stuff from the native stuff that will never leave the quadrant... I find it useful to draw a diagonal slash through the NI/NU quadrant like so, and maintain a separate awareness of the Potentially Important/Potentially Urgent stuff. This is stuff around which I like to maintain high situation awareness. Minor shifts in the state of play could affect these items. *