Podcast Ep 145 | Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix

Are you strug­gling to pri­or­i­tize tasks and max­i­mize your productivity?

The Time Man­age­ment Matrix, cre­at­ed by Stephen Cov­ey, could be the solu­tion you’ve been look­ing for. In this pod­cast, we’ll teach you how to effec­tive­ly use the matrix to set goals and achieve suc­cess in both your per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life. Through real-life exam­ples, you’ll learn how to man­age your time in each of the matrix’s four quadrants.

We all have lim­it­ed time and exact­ly 24 hours in a day, and yet, some peo­ple accom­plish more at work and can also have more of a life that they love…. While oth­ers may work just as many hours, want the same thing and come up short.

If you want to increase your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and bet­ter man­age your time, this pod­cast is a must-lis­ten. Don’t miss out on these valu­able time man­age­ment tips and techniques.

Links quot­ed in the episode:

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/57338a0e2fe1312482379195/1485791609237-SRR2U6TPSZC25MSBR85Z/?content-type=image%2Fjpeg 

https://​www​.sta​tista​.com/​s​t​a​t​i​s​t​i​c​s​/​4​1​1​7​7​5​/​a​v​e​r​a​g​e​-​d​a​i​l​y​-​t​i​m​e​-​w​a​t​c​h​i​n​g​-​t​v​-​u​s​-​b​y​-age/ 

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that mat­ter that last that peo­ple enjoy work­ing in, that make a dif­fer­ence and that you enjoy own­ing, of course, my name is Brett Giles. And as always, I’m joined today by my co host, Kevin Lawrence in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. G’day Kevin, how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:35

I am good. Actu­al­ly, I’m not quite in Van­cou­ver today I’m at a place called just out­side a place called Kelow­na BC about four hours to Van­cou­ver. To be pre­cise, where it’s cold, and snowy and beau­ti­ful right now with all the snow on the ground. I’m doing great. Look­ing for­ward to today’s show. Some­thing that we’re both quite pas­sion­ate about. max­i­miz­ing our time, which we’ll talk about a bit more today. But yeah,

Brad Giles 01:00

late days Good day, we’d like to start with a word or phrase of the day what might be on your mind Kev.

Kevin Lawrence 01:07

Ah, cel­e­brate is the phrase of the day. I was real­ly for­tu­nate in Decem­ber to cel­e­brate with a client of ours that sold a chunk of their busi­ness for a rather very notable amount of mon­ey. And we went and we went down to Mex­i­co and a place called point to Mita beau­ti­ful lit­tle pri­vate resort area. And we worked for three days. And then all the spous­es came down and cel­e­brat­ed for three days in Mex­i­co in the sun, hav­ing some fun, and kind of enjoy­ing the fruits of our labors for all the hard work we’ve done over the years build­ing this com­pa­ny. So it was Ender­al gonna con­tin­ue on but it was a lot of cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion, which usu­al­ly means cham­pagne and, and pin­ion and being grate­ful and reflect­ing and feel­ing. You know, appre­ci­at­ed. So cel­e­bra­tion is in the pow­er of cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion is just very good. I found the report. Are you what’s yours?

Brad Giles 02:09

Grat­i­tude? Yeah, just grat­i­tude quite sim­ply. Sum­mer in Aus­tralia, get­ting to spend time with the fam­i­ly get­ting to Yeah, just get­ting to appre­ci­ate and take stock take a moment to real­ly think about, you know, how for­tu­nate we are on so many, many lev­els. So, gratitude.

Kevin Lawrence 02:31

I like it. Well, cel­e­bra­tion and grat­i­tude are tied togeth­er, although you can cel­e­brate with­out being grate­ful. But when you put those two togeth­er, it’s a mag­ic com­bi­na­tion. Okay, so let’s dig into max­i­miz­ing our time. Let’s talk about the show today. But

Brad Giles 02:49

Oh, indeed. Look, I tell you this, this con­cept from Stephen Cov­ey, the time man­age­ment matrix is it’s one of my favorites. And I know I’ve said that before. But the the time man­age­ment matrix is just it’s so sim­ple. And yet it real­ly does serve the base for high­ly effec­tive indi­vid­ual and team per­for­mance. It real­ly does. And it asks the ques­tion, what are you focused on what is con­sum­ing your time we look around, and every­body has 24 hours in a day, but some peo­ple just seem to get so much work done, they seem to accom­plish so much more. And oth­ers seem to, you know, the aver­age per­son per­haps seems to toil and toil and toil, but nev­er per­haps real­ly get that mas­sive trac­tion, that mas­sive motion that they need in the same giv­en time peri­od. We’ve all got 24 hours. So this this time man­age­ment matrix, it real­ly asks the ques­tion, Where is your time going? And how is that aligned with what you real­ly want in life?

Kevin Lawrence 04:07

Yeah, and it forces you to think and be more dis­ci­plined in your thoughts, to try our thought and action, to spend more time where it real­ly mat­ters, and to help to man­age or catch your­self when you slip out of the stuff that real­ly mat­ters most, although it feels real­ly impor­tant in those moments.

Brad Giles 04:30

Yeah, yeah. And so it’s a real­ly sim­ple two by two. That helps you, I guess, frame out, where is your time going? Where is it going? What are you doing? We had a look before­hand, and we found a cou­ple of real­ly inter­est­ing stats. The amount of time that peo­ple are spend­ing both on Face­book num­ber one on aver­age per day and watch­ing time ele­va­tion per day, as I very quick­ly tried to find that here we are. Yeah, so the data basi­cal­ly said that Face­book glob­al users spend an aver­age of 58 min­utes per day, on the plat­form in 2022,

Kevin Lawrence 05:15

aver­age, average,

Brad Giles 05:18

that’s almost an hour. Okay. And then TV, watch­ing TV, this is only the US for this start­up com­pared to the whole the globe 3.86 hours a day in the US in 2021,

Kevin Lawrence 05:38

which would include nor­mal tele­vi­sion and Net­flix, but you take those, and you add in, you know, Insta­gram or oth­er social things, that’s about four hours a day of screen time, or very close to four hours a day of, you know, watch­ing a screen or inter­view or inter­act­ing with a screen. And we’re not say­ing that TV is bad or social is bad, I will say, I’m very con­scious about the amount of time I spend doing it. Because I have high­ly valu­able things to do in my world, whether it’s with my kids, or my par­ents, or my friends, or my part­ner, all of that stuff. Um, or it’s things like you and I do on a pod­cast and oth­er things that we were talk­ing about before the show. It’s also why I delet­ed Face­book, and this Insta­gram apps off of my device. Yeah, yeah. Because I found, I mean, some of this stuff is inter­est­ing. And you can get sucked, it’s not impor­tant. But it’s inter­est­ing. And you I can get sucked into hours on that stuff. Because it’s designed to be addic­tive, and stim­u­lat­ing and suck you in, and it works good. So I want to be clear, this is not about don’t do social media. What we’re talk­ing about is, is I’m going to ref­er­ence the quad­rants here is what’s basi­cal­ly called, you know, quad­rant four stuff, or quad­rant three stuff, both of which is, you know, in the not impor­tant cat­e­go­ry, it’s not impor­tant. And I would say no, what you brought, both of those are not urgent, total­ly agree, right, like in our lives. So it’s quad­rant four, it’s a now you might enjoy doing some social stuff to wind down or TV, they’re like, fine, we’re not say­ing to do it. But we’re say­ing, com­pared to doing some­thing that moves you towards some­thing crit­i­cal in your world, whether it’s a rela­tion­ship or project, or who knows what, that isn’t hap­pen­ing in quad­rant four. And a lot of us get dis­tract­ed by all kinds of things that don’t mat­ter in that quad­rant of not urgent, and not impor­tant, real­ly, there’s no val­ue to it. And you know, and mod­el that we have here, there’s also some­times that can be, you know, email, or, you know, easy activ­i­ties that just, yeah, they don’t mat­ter, but they kind of burn up the time. So, you know, in my world, I’m very con­scious about doing almost any­thing, I’m very sen­si­tive, doing any­thing, that’s not impor­tant. It real­ly does­n’t add val­ue to my work, my health or myself, or my part­ners or friends rela­tion­ships, then it’s like, Well, why would I? Why would I do it,

Brad Giles 08:27

and mold­ing and I’m a bit extreme, yeah, more than any oth­er deci­sion, the deci­sion for an indi­vid­ual to under­stand the four quad­rants, and to elim­i­nate things that are in quad­rant three or four, and work to elim­i­nate things that are in quad­rant one that is quite pos­si­bly the most impact­ful deci­sion that you could make. So before we move on, Kev, what I’d like to do is to just for those of you who are on the video, and I real­ized that not every­one in the audi­ence, we just want to go through very quick­ly on the screen, what we are actu­al­ly talk­ing about here. So for those of you on the YouTube video, what you should be able to see is the time man­age­ment matrix. And so there is a ver­ti­cal axis and a hor­i­zon­tal axis. The ver­ti­cal axis says, Is it impor­tant or not impor­tant in a two by two matrix? Is it impor­tant or not impor­tant? The hor­i­zon­tal axis says Is it urgent or not urgent. So we’ve got these four quad­rants that we’ve been talk­ing about. In a top left hand cor­ner, we’ve got things that are urgent and impor­tant. And you might think that’s the most impor­tant one, you got to get those impor­tant urgent things out the door. We’ve got to hus­tle, hus­tle, hus­tle. But then below that we’ve got things that are urgent and not impor­tant. So that is inter­rup­tions, some emails, some calls, some activ­i­ties, some press­ing mat­ters. Where­as quad­rant one above it might be things input impor­tant and urgent. The first one I men­tioned, crises, press­ing prob­lems, some oth­er emails, some dead­line dri­ven projects. So then as we go back down Quad­rant for things that are not impor­tant, and not urgent, this is where the tele­vi­sion, were watch­ing the news, the Face­book, scrolling Insta­gram, what­ev­er it is, where that from

Kevin Lawrence 10:31

our per­spec­tive, some peo­ple watch the news because it’s part of their job. And we’re not say­ing what from our view or in our lives, that would be less impor­tant to us. Just to be clear, if we’re dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent things are impor­tant. Yeah,

Brad Giles 10:46

yeah. And prob­a­bly for the major­i­ty of our audi­ence, scrolling Face­book, we’re seeing

Kevin Lawrence 10:51

it for the major­i­ty of our audi­ence would agree with that. You’re right.

Brad Giles 10:55

And so quad­rant four, not urgent, and not impor­tant triv­ia, busy work, time wasters, Face­book, maybe read­ing the news­pa­per, maybe, yeah, watch­ing TV, watch­ing what­ev­er it is, some calls and some emails, and then we get to quad­rant two, which is in the top right cor­ner. So this is things that are impor­tant, and not urgent. And this is where we’re say­ing that you’ve got to focus and try to switch your time towards so that is rela­tion­ship build­ing, find­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties, long term plan­ning, eg strate­gic plan­ning, or even at a per­son­al lev­el, some oth­er per­son­al goal plan­ning, pre­ven­ta­tive activ­i­ties, like exer­cise, or med­i­ta­tion, or some­thing like that, per­haps per­son­al growth, recre­ation or some recre­ation. So these are the things that are not urgent and impor­tant. So the job to get what you real­ly want, what we’re say­ing is that switch­ing from and find­ing a way over the long term to switch from quad­rant one, three or four, as much of your time as pos­si­ble into quad­rant two is what gen­er­ates the great­est risk.

Kevin Lawrence 12:20

And again, for those that can’t see it, Quad­rant Two is impor­tant, but not urgent stuff. It’s proac­tive things you’re doing to build and lay tracks for the future. So in terms of impor­tant stuff, if you’re only doing urgent stuff that can be, you know, urgent and impor­tant, which is quad­rant one, it can be drain­ing, and you’re always fire­fight­ing. So it’s almost you’re always reac­tionary burns a lot of ener­gy, and it can be real­ly excit­ing too, can be real­ly fun, you get to pull your pull out your super­hero cape all the time and save the day. But real­ly, it’s you’re burn­ing a lot of excess ener­gy, get­ting things done, mak­ing a lot of noise, deal­ing with a lot of dra­ma, and you know, you can win. But ide­al­ly, we want the best place to be for suc­cess. And to have also a sol­id, scal­able busi­ness is more quad­rant to where it’s, it’s not as urgent, although it’s still very impor­tant. And basi­cal­ly, like Brad talked about stay­ing out of the bot­tom quad­rants three and four, that is just not impor­tant stuff. And so if I look at my own world, like what’s in quad­rant two, well, quad­rant two is, you know, work­ing with my team on their growth and their devel­op­ment, work­ing with, you know, new cus­tomers that come along and try­ing to help find the right solu­tions for them. You know, time with my fam­i­ly and friends, doing the high qual­i­ty things that I want. And some­times it is a lot of plan­ning, it is my plan­ning and per­son­al plan­ning. The urgent stuff is when there’s, you know, an issue with uh, with the IT sys­tem, or there’s a chal­lenge with this or a prob­lem with that some­thing that’s come up that seems urgent. I real­ly don’t, I don’t enjoy spend­ing a lot of time in that. It’s like, it’s like I got bet­ter things to do. And although there is dis­ci­pline and again, for me in the not impor­tant. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not impor­tant. I basi­cal­ly my world, if it’s not enhanc­ing my enjoy­ment of the moment, or enhanc­ing an impor­tant rela­tion­ship, I gen­er­al­ly try to not do it. Yeah, I gen­er­al­ly del­e­gate every­thing else. And that comes right down to like, home repairs, like my rule of thumb is if I could do some­thing to do with fix­ing some­thing, and it’s gonna bring me joy, great, which is very few things. Or I can teach my kids how to do some­thing. If I can teach my kids and teach them some life skills and stuff like that, then I’d be inter­est­ed Oth­er­wise, it’s who can i Who can I hire to han­dle it? Yeah. Because to me, it’s not enhanc­ing me and my life and it’s not enhanc­ing some­one I care about life, then gen­er­al­ly I’m out. I don’t I don’t want to do

Brad Giles 15:12

1. So the prob­lem is that, that with most peo­ple in quad­rant spend­ing most of their time in quad­rant one in the work­place on things that are urgent and impor­tant. crises, press­ing prob­lems, urgent emails, dead­line dri­ven, protégé,

Kevin Lawrence 15:31

bro­ken sys­tems, ser­vice fail­ures, whatever,

Brad Giles 15:33

I love this stuff. Oh, yeah, you know, I’ve done actu­al­ly, with lead­er­ship teams, I’ve worked with a lot of work, where they’ve net per­cent­ages into each of these four quad­rants. And by far and away more often than not, what you find is that peo­ple are spend­ing most of their time in quad­rant one, maybe a bit of quad­rant two, but very lit­tle, like five temps in quad­rant two. Yep. And so with that, what is the results that hap­pen when you spend most of your time in quad­rant one, and look, it’s stress, it’s burnout, it’s cri­sis man­age­ment, you set your­self up to always be putting out fires, and to deal with the next one. And that’s not great. Because that intro­duces like an adren­a­line loop that, that’s very hard to get out of. Yes, and I get stuck. Because it’s like, when you solve a prob­lem, a cri­sis, it’s reward­ing. But then you look for the next one, or you’re not actu­al­ly work­ing to solve the root cause of the prob­lem might like del­e­gate, or Exactly.

Kevin Lawrence 16:38

And that’s and you just made a key point that abroad, solv­ing the prob­lem is reward­ing. You get acco­lades, you get to be the hero, you get to use your cre­ativ­i­ty, all of that stuff. But and all those hero­ics are cel­e­brat­ed in com­pa­nies, I look at it and go, obvi­ous­ly, we’re not that good at what we do if we need so many damn hero­ics. It to me makes me to me, it’s like this is ama­teur hour. We don’t know what we’re, what we’re doing. And as you the point that you made those crit­i­cal is, when there’s a prob­lem, you should try to trace down to the root, solve the root. So you can pre­vent 100 future cri­sis oppor­tu­ni­ties of this from the same source. And that’s the idea. But that is urgent and not impor­tant. Sor­ry, not not urgent, but impor­tant. Lay­ing down bet­ter sys­tems or pre­vent­ing those issues. It takes dis­ci­pline and time to get out to get away. So it’s inter­est­ing I found, and I could tell you 50 dif­fer­ent sto­ries. But gen­er­al­ly, when we go into a com­pa­ny and start doing strate­gic plan­ning, they’re spend­ing time almost every­where, but quad­rant two, which is the sweet spot, which is urgent, not urgent, and, and impor­tant. There is a lot of unim­por­tant stuff because they can’t tell the dif­fer­ence. And every­thing is urgent. Gen­er­al­ly, it’s an undis­ci­plined oper­at­ing sys­tem, with peo­ple try­ing to do their best. So when we start spend­ing time on plan­ning, which is again, quad­rant two, doing the strat plan­ning, as we go through it, I found it’s mag­i­cal­ly weird. But about the fifth or sixth meet­ing, which is at about the 18 month mark, right, fifth or sixth quar­ter­ly meet­ing, all of a sud­den, it’s a bor­ing frickin meet­ing. The meet­ings bor­ing, because we’ve been deal­ing with all the whack a mole and all the stuff that we’ve been doing to get things fixed. And all of a sud­den, there’s no more dra­ma. Yeah, and it’s weird. And some­times we have a very flat meet­ing, because we’re you could basi­cal­ly not we’re not run­ning on adren­a­line any­more. Now we’re like pro­fes­sion­al man­agers. And the metaphor I use is like an aero­plane, when it’s try­ing to get off the ground. It’s like full throt­tle, there’s lots of noise and shak­ing, and it’s burn­ing up a huge amount of fuel to get in the air. What’s in the air glides prac­ti­cal­ly? Like it’s way eas­i­er. And it’s like this tran­sit areas, match­ing things. It’s about 18 months of dis­ci­pline, to retrain the sys­tem and get off the adren­a­line and get off the pro­fes­sion­al Whack a Mole. And let me grab my Super­man Cape out of my, my, my my desk draw­er. And it’s it’s a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem. But we’ve installed dis­ci­plines, we’ve elim­i­nat­ed noise, and we built more under­stand­ing of sure­ly what is impor­tant, and tried to flush out a bunch of stuff that’s not it’s, it’s quite well,

Brad Giles 19:34

there’s there’s one SEO friend of mine, and he had the explic­it goal to spend 100% of his time in q2. So he spoke about it quite reg­u­lar­ly. He said, I know exact­ly when I’m drift­ing to q1, q3 or q4. I know when I’m drift­ing away. I know you know, I can’t do it all. But you spend time in q2 on things that are Not not urgent and impor­tant, is spend time in q2, so that you can have less time in q1. So you carve out a lit­tle niche of time, let’s say so then you can, you know, do a root cause analy­sis as you intend­ed, or del­e­gate some­thing, or hire some­body or what­ev­er it is, so that you can spend a lit­tle bit less time in q1. And that com­pound­ed over time is where it goes, but this guy had a great busi­ness. And he was on this absolute mis­sion, less time in Q one,

Kevin Lawrence 20:36

what he’s real­ly say­ing is, I’m gonna do my frickin job. The CEOs job is to be in q2, yes. CEO, his job is not in q1, like urgent stuff. If a CEO is involved in urgent stuff reg­u­lar­ly, that means their team isn’t strong enough, or the dis­ci­pline isn’t strong. And the CEOs job is in q2, it is about build­ing the busi­ness for the future. So you know, he’s, he’s smart to want to do that. But that is his job. So inter­est­ing. I’ll give an example.

Brad Giles 21:10

Sor­ry, I’d love that. That is just Yeah, that’s great. The CEOs job is to spend all of their time in q2, and to a less­er degree, the senior lead­ers as well.

Kevin Lawrence 21:20

Exact­ly, to pull the busi­ness towards that dis­ci­plined, proac­tive focus of build­ing a great com­pa­ny, ver­sus any­body can jump in and deal with cri­sis. And it’s just too much of that is not good. So I’ll give an exam­ple. Between q1, which is urgent and impor­tant, and q2, not urgent and impor­tant. I should know for me, it’s q1 ver­sus q3, it’s urgent. Yeah, seems urgent. One was impor­tant one was­n’t, it’s a decoy. So with a client in the strap plan­ning meet­ing, and then they get an email that comes in from their largest client who was about 20 mil­lion in rev­enue. And this is, you know, a busi­ness that did about 100 mil­lion in rev­enue at the time. 20 mil­lion was mean­ing­ful. And the client was a pain, low mar­gin and demand­ing. Thank­ful­ly, we’ve done some prof­itabil­i­ty analy­sis in recent­ly. So we knew prof­itabil­i­ty by cus­tomer by ser­vice, every­thing a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful work. And I remem­bered some­thing it was clients, i Hey, CFO, how much do prof­it do we make a year on this client on the 20 mil­lion in rev­enue? He looks it up in about 20 sec­onds, which was impres­sive. He goes 250 grand. Great. Tell them to pound sand. Let’s get back to work. We instant­ly took what sound­ed urgent, what was urgent. And because they were mak­ing demands, they were demand­ing fur­ther dis­counts. And, and it sound­ed urgent and impor­tant. But with a tiny bit of data, we decid­ed that it was­n’t impor­tant. Make 250 grand a year, which is

Brad Giles 23:11

not worth the effort. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 23:13

not is it less than 1% 2.1% prof­it on it? Yeah, right. It’s an insult­ing amount of prof­it. It’s not even pret­ty well worth talk­ing about for more than a minute or two. Yeah. But it sound­ed urgent and impor­tant. But with data, we real­ized it’s actu­al­ly not impor­tant. Piss off, let’s move on. Yeah. And some­one went and dealt with them pro­fes­sion­al­ly and every­thing else, but it’s under­stand­ing the May the true mag­ni­tude and again, busi­ness, the mag­ni­tude of a client is not rev­enue, its prof­it. And no, no, if they had said, look, it’s 20 mil­lion in rev­enue, and 5 mil­lion a prof­it. Well, that would have been urgent and impor­tant. Because if 5 mil­lion a prof­it at a client if it’s pro­duc­ing 25% prof­it, so the bot­tom line, that’s a damn big pri­or­i­ty. And I think you know, yeah,

Brad Giles 24:08

yeah, that’s good. That’s good lead­er­ship teams can all be stuck in q1 as well. And I’ve def­i­nite­ly seen that the one one team comes to mind actu­al­ly, and they’re just, they’re a very busy busi­ness, if that makes any sense. And one of the prob­lems was struc­tural­ly, the CFO saw no val­ue invest­ing in the busi­ness. Okay, so I know, for those of you who did­n’t see that, Kevin just retract­ed and frowned. He, now he’s all val­ue in invest­ing. But if you know what I mean, it’s like, look, this soft­ware is, is from 20 years ago, we should­n’t be using this. We should have a cloud based sys­tem as one sin­gle exam­ple. We should­n’t have an on site serv­er. That world has changed like That’s just one sin­gle exam­ple. And he’s like, look, it works. Why do we need to replace it? Let’s not replace it. And he would just be this block of for every­thing. And that meant that whilst I gave the exam­ple of a serv­er, it hap­pened across all of these areas, which we should have been invest­ing in q2, so that we could free up q1. But being the block­er and stop­ping and stop­ping and stop­ping and stop­ping all of these invest­ments meant that they just they just got stuck in this vicious q1 loop. And it was it they were always focus­ing on putting out fires, and just try­ing to get things to work in the messy sys­tems that they had urgent. And I’m

Kevin Lawrence 25:47

see­ing it so much. I’m with you, Brad so many times and tru­ly our work. So if the CEOs job is to be in q2, yeah, our work is to to every­thing we do pret­ty well as q2. Yeah, we don’t do like we do, q2, because we know that’s the point. Again, q2 is not urgent and impor­tant. That’s the place where you build long term val­ue and endur­ing great com­pa­ny. So the ques­tion for you to think about as you’re lis­ten­ing to us, how much of your time do you spend in q2, which is not urgent, but impor­tant things? That’s the ulti­mate? And the oth­er way, guys, how much of your time do you spend on tru­ly very, very high­ly impor­tant things? And you know, and that’s it for me, I know if I think about this, and I’ve done a lot of work on this over the years, I spend my gosh, 95% of my time above the line on impor­tant things. Yeah. Real­ly, like, it’s got to be in the 90s. And then the the q2, which is the not urgent, it depends on how we would define it. Like, you know, for me, you know, bright­ness is a dif­fer­ence between build­ing a firm and work­ing with my clients.

Brad Giles 27:16

And work­ing on your­self. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 27:19

I there’s, there’s a whole thing, how would I split out what’s urgent and not urgent in my world? I have very lit­tle that’s last minute reac­tionary, urgent. Yeah. But I also could divide time between client work and long term build­ing of the frame­work, there’s a whole oth­er con­ver­sa­tion or but so the point of this, but

Brad Giles 27:38

I’d prob­a­bly encour­age the lis­ten­ers to have a look at or down­load the Stephen Cov­ey time man­age­ment matrix, which is from his book, The Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple. And look at those four quad­rants under­stand it, per­haps, and think what per­cent­age of my time is in each of those four quad­rants? In my wak­ing time, let’s say? And then, giv­en how you rat­ed your­self, are you achiev­ing the goals that you want? Yeah, then how, if you were to zoom out to like a three 510 year time­frame time­line, how could you shift more of your time into q1, so that you could achieve more of the goals or the things that you real­ly want?

Kevin Lawrence 28:24

Right. And I think that’s why, Brad, that the US in terms of the com­pa­nies that work with dri­ving strate­gic plan­ning, forces more time in queue to in terms of non urgent, impor­tant, and even with, you know, from your oxy­gen mask, first, the mas­ter plan that we have, where we’re updat­ing lots of clients right now, for next year, where we have, you know, what you want to be true by the end of your life, what do you want to achieve in 10 years, three years, and the next year, just the top one or two things and each just by nature of being con­nect­ed to that and remind­ing so that it moves you more in that direc­tion? Because all that stuff? Is q2 stuff? Yeah, right. It’s all not urgent and high­ly impor­tant. So we con­tin­u­al­ly define impor­tant with goals, and try to work on it proac­tive­ly. So we’re not flashed into the urgent. The only time it gets urgent is when you’re not going to achieve a goal on time. As long as you got­ta get cre­ative to get it done.

Brad Giles 29:20

But it still comes back to you will then slip­ping back into q1. And then how do you stop that hap­pen­ing next time?

Kevin Lawrence 29:28

Exact­ly. And how do we be bet­ter than them? It’s impor­tant stuff and find­ing mech­a­nisms to stay to know what’s impor­tant. Stay focused on it, and not liv­ing in urgent adren­a­line based all the time because that gets a lit­tle hard on you. Yeah, yeah, great con­ver­sa­tion, great conversation,

Brad Giles 29:45

okay to grow.

Kevin Lawrence 29:47

It is a great tool, and I’ve been using that in my mind a lot. And we obvi­ous­ly see how com­pa­nies build more dis­ci­pline, and dis­ci­pline is what pulls you to the right and up. Alright, well thanks for lis­ten­ing today. This This has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast with Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia, and Kevin Lawrence in Kelow­na BC today to sub­scribe to the show you just hit that but­ton. Give us a rat­ing if you’re hap­py with it. You’ve got sug­ges­tions for shows, please send us a note as well. We’ll respond to those when we can, for the video ver­sion, go to youtube​.com just search the growth whis­pers. Brad and I both have week­ly newslet­ters with lots of great con­tent and we just love to share what we’ve learned and learn from great peo­ple like your­selves. You know, Brad, you can find out more about him in his firm at evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au and Kevin and his newslet­ter as well. Lots me Kevin is Lawrence​and​co​.com. Hope you have a great week. And hope­ful­ly your week has a lot of time in that crit­i­cal quad­rant to have urgent no par­don me. Not urgent and high­ly impor­tant. Have a good one.