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The Life Management Matrix
By Brick | February 14, 2008
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In my post on Rethinking Time Management, I introduced the Four Quadrants of Life Management. I noted a similarity, at least in form but I think also in substance, between this Life Management Matrix and the Time Management Matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Yesterday, I was reading a post on Time Leadership for Bloggers where the author organized his blogging activities into the Covey Time Management matrix. One thing that I liked about his description of the Covey matrix was how he gave each quadrant a name, specifically:
- Important and Urgent activities reside in the Quadrant of Stress.
- Activities that are important but not urgent reside in the Quadrant of Value.
- Activities that are not important yet urgent reside in the Quadrant of Deception.
- Activities that are not important and not urgent reside in the Quadrant of Regret.
I immediately started thinking that the quadrants in the Life Management Matrix needed catchy names as well! So here goes:
- Essential and Unforgettable (EU): Items that have to get done and will make an impact on your life reside in the Quadrant of Transformation.
- Essential but Forgettable (EF): Items that need to get done, but will not really have an impact on your life reside in the Quadrant of Automation.
- Unessential but Unforgettable (UU): Items that don’t need to get done, but which may provide a great deal of fun or lasting memories reside in the Quadrant of Fun.
- Unessential and Forgettable (UF): Items for which no one is depending on you, and that do not impact your health or happiness reside in the Quadrant of Elimination.
Of course, a picture (or chart!) says a thousand words:
I am not married to these particular names yet, so any opinions on these would be appreciated!
Popularity: 22% [?]
Topics: Time Management |
February 15th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Hey there. I think you’ll want to review the wording for quadrants 2 and 3 in your list above… you have them identical
Also, I would agree with Stephen Covey that if Fun is important, then it goes into the upper right. It’s important to you, make time for it.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I like some, but not all. My suggestions:
* EU: Quadrant of Accentuation
* EF: Quadrant of Reduction
* UF: Quadrant of Elimination
* UU: Quadrant of Gratification (or Personal Enlightenment)
As in… Accentuate the Postitive, Eliminate the Negative, Reduce the Unnecessary, and Focus on what counts.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Brick, one of my favourite features of Getting Things Done, perhaps the favourite feature, is it solved a problem I had: prioritizing.
I’m going to be very against the grain here: Trying to prioritize things every night didn’t work for me.
Why?
You’d wake up, things would happen, you’d be thrown off your priorities, and feel bad about it. Or, something you felt was more important comes up, you do that, and it makes the prioritized list seem useless.
Further, because it’s a prioritized list, you naturally have to spend time thinking what is more important: a, c, d, b, e, or h… or is h so unimportant it doesn’t even really belong on this list?
And all of this could change super fast with life.
Allen’s idea about an item’s context, and your energy level at the time, where you are, etc., was a truly obvious idea I was not benefiting from.
Now I trust my 100 billion neuron / 900 billion glial cell brain of mine to look at a larger list and make the right decision about which one is important. If I change my mind, that’s okay. There’s probably a good reason for it — if not, the item is still captured and I can drop what I was doing and get back to it.
And IF I procrastinate which everyone does sometimes, well, I’ve got a got a whole bunch of things to procrastinate with “that are reasonably good things to do.”
I’m not saying the quadrant thing isn’t valid… I think it is valid. I just think the human brain is so powerful and so capable of making good decisions; and GTD works by clearing up all the trivia, moving it outside the brain into lists, folders, trays, virtual data, whatever…
… now having done that, I trust myself to pick and choose what serves me from any quadrant. Even the quadrant of sitting on my duff drinking a Starbucks if that’s what I want to do.
I can always process the other items later!
February 21st, 2008 at 8:12 pm
To everyone, I have been battling a terrible cold for the last week and hence the delay in responding to the great feedback!
@id_bob: good catch and thanks for pointing that out! I have since fixed that.
@Rex: excellent suggestions. I really like “automation” over “reduction” though because of the tie in with the 4HWW, but I think you are probably correct - “reduction” is a word that better describes what I mean for EF.
@Christoph: you illustrate the value of “capture” nicely. Ideally, I am actually trying to avoid having to even capture some things (UF and UU). I was inspired by an article that wondered whether a system (e.g. GTD) could at times be a little too much overhead. Since that article was a little anti-GTD, it is important to hear from people like you that have been able to make it really work.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
[…] tried to use Brick’s Life Management Matrix(”Essential & Unforgetable”), but it simply did not work for me. I found that […]
March 6th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
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