In the previous article we talked about how our brain is overstimulated , overloaded, overwhelmed with information, visual and auditory stimuli of all kinds.
That same brain is the one that must decide whether to attend to this visual and auditory surge, or to focus on a task or a thought that helps you more to achieve your goals.
It is interesting and very helpful to distinguish what a day, a week, a year are made of and, adding up, our whole lives. For our brain, our life and our time are shaped by events, events … something that happens to us.
Time is a succession of events that pass continuously , whatever happens. We can classify each of these events on the scale of the urgent and the important .
The urgent thing is everything that must be done immediately ; It therefore contains a lot of pressure, especially social; it comes from outside, it acts on us. Events can be very urgent, not very urgent, or not at all urgent.
On the other hand, there is the important thing, which is everything that we value , that is relevant, our interest, our convenience, that which has a specific weight in our life . Also here we distinguish that each event has its high importance or almost nothing matters.
However , not everything that is important is urgent, nor is everything that is urgent important. In fact, there are 4 quadrants in what Stephen R. Covey called the Time Matrix . Let’s review some examples of each.
The quadrant 3, the distraction is the one that contains events of our life that we led by the pressure, unconsciousness, incongruity or simply the desire to not get into major problems, as when we ask for information elaborate that We would rather not do it, but the person who asked is the boss or a person who has helped us in other circumstances. This is the “can’t say NO” quadrant .
The quadrant 4, the waste , seems “liberation”, an escape from stress ; however, it sinks us more and more, as this is a wrong use of our time . For example, entertaining hours and hours with the new little game as a way to avoid responsibility, or attending social networks for fun neglecting more valuable topics, such as health, rest, meaningful human contact.
The quadrant 2, the quadrant of the extraordinary productivity , including everything good in life, involves concentrated work, rest, fun, creativity, organization, planning, prevention and implementation of those highly significant activities, for the simple reason that they are important to us.
This is the quadrant and the type of things that we must maximize in our life . The first step you just did: choose to read this article instead of being distracted by the email or the notification that appeared on this same screen … or not?
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