Why Use the Covey Four Square
The four square model will help you determine what activities you should increase and decrease. But it goes further in that it helps you identify how to restructure your work so that you do less fire fighting.
How to use the Covey Four Square
Below I take you through the Four Square thinking. And at the very bottom of this lesson I include two templates for you to use.
Introducing the Covey Four Square
I have been using this tool as an advisory tool ever since I found it in Steven Covey’s, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and I think it is a handy way to think about prioritizing your work.
The way the quadrant works is that you plot importance on one axis and urgency on another. You end up with the four quadrants of the Cartesian plane representing four levels of work:
Quadrant one is important, urgent stuff.
In corporate speak we often call this “fire fighting” so think of this as a house burning down – you must put the house out, there is no way around it.
Quadrant two is important, not urgent stuff.
These are tasks that matter but aren’t quite critical yet. For example, something like making your house more fireproof or fire resistant. Anybody who lives in a forested area will know about creating defendable space – a clearing around the house that makes it harder for a fire to reach the house and more straightforward for firefighters to defend the home from fire.
Again, most of our time is in quadrant one. However, here is the exciting thing, the more time we spend in quadrant 2, the fewer urgent, important things come up.
If you prepare your house to not burn, you are much less likely to be in the situation where it is on fire, and you must put it out. You are much better off preventing the fire than putting it out.
My consultant example above follows the same pattern: rather than create a ton of work responding immediately and in pieces, just sit down and do it the right way from the beginning. Not only is this less stressful, but it is a lot easier.
Quadrant four is not important, but urgent stuff
In my household example this might be something like pruning the fruit trees. It is best to prune trees within a window of time, so it is urgent. However, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t run the important. Properly pruned and blooming fruit trees is more of a nice to have.
There is a lot of urgent not important work out there. Much of the world’s communication falls into this category.
Anything and everything marked FYI generally falls into this category. It is urgent because it pops up, but if the sender can’t even be bothered to write about why you should care, it is pretty much irrelevant. Just delete.
Quadrant three is neither ugent nor important stuff.
Continuing with the housing analogy this might be painting the walls. Even better is watching Netflix.
It is perfectly okay to do quadrant 3 stuff; we have to do it mindfully. Decide to binge watch Stranger Things with a tube of popcorn on a rainy Saturday afternoon – go for it. Just know that it is unimportant, enjoy it. Have fun. However, don’t do it for the rest of your life.
NOW THAT YOU KNOW WHAT THE FOUR SQUARES ARE, WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT IT?
The crux of the fours squares as I use them and understand them is this:
- You must do urgent and important stuff.
- Many times, things that seem urgent, aren’t. So work to reduce urgency ask yourself what you can schedule and what you can postpone.
- “Postpone” does not mean “procrastinate.” Schedule it and make time for it so that you do the work but give yourself time to do it.
- Relentlessly focus on non-urgent important work. That will reduce urgent/important work.
- Number 4 is so significant that I will repeat it: work in important but not urgent, this is where your real power to deliver quality work and make a difference lies, this is where you are in control.
- Unimportant doesn’t mean it doesn’t get done. There is stuff in life that isn’t important that you do anyway, enjoy it.
- Remember that important also depends on perspective. Some things may be unimportant for work but essential for life. If you are a fruit farmer, pruning trees is important. You may not think yoga is critical, I can’t live without it. Know what matters to you.
Use the above to identify (we have a sheet for this on the last page of the prioritization workbook).
- What you should do more of.
- What you should do less of.
- What you should stop.
- What you should start.
Keep these in mind as you think about your work.
The Four Square exercise in practice
A few years ago, I worked with an executive team at a large international company. The team lived, breathed, and did everything in between in quadrant one. They were the best firefighters out there, and they liked to work hard.
However, they couldn’t get anything done.
When we asked them to categorize their work, they all thought they were in control in the non-urgent quadrant. So we asked the administrative assistants.
We agreed with the team on how to categorize their work, then went back over a month of their activities and put them in the quadrants. More than 85% of their time was spent in quadrant 1. Almost none was spent in quadrant 2.
When they saw this, they made a shift. The most concerning metric for them was safety, and by shifting their focus to quadrant two, they reduced safety issues by more than 60%. They were also able to launch an innovation program and cut out millions of dollars in recurring costs.
Not through magic, through focus.
Download the Tools
We have two tools available to help you with your priorities. The first is the Covey Four Square tool. This is a simpler tool that guides you simply through the four square exercises. We also have the prioritization workbook, which combines the four square exercises with the 4D exercise. I recommend you start with this workbook but include both here.