But however you do it, focusing isn’t as simple as saying no—or even as saying no to the right things. You’ll exclude some things by default but knowing when to say ‘let’s see’ and how strongly to say yes is also very useful.
This reminds me of Steven Covey’s idea of a coordinate graph with four quadrants where you graph importance on on axis and urgency on the other. This gives you for types of “activities” to invest your time into.
Urgent and Unimportant (a phone ringing is a good example): this is where many people loose a tremendous amount of time
Urgent and Important (A broken bone or crime in progress) hese immediately demand our “focus”
Not Urgent and Not Important: pure time wasters- not a good place to invest much energy
Not Urgent BUT Important. This is the area Steven made a point of saying that most people fall short. Because these things are not urgent, we tend to put them off and not invest enough enough energy into them, but since they are important this means we pay a hefty price in the long run. Into this category he puts things like our health, important relationships, personal development and self improvement to name a few.
When we choose what to focus our energy on, we would do well to direct as much of it as possible to these types of activites
Yes, agreed.
This reminds me of Steven Covey’s idea of a coordinate graph with four quadrants where you graph importance on on axis and urgency on the other. This gives you for types of “activities” to invest your time into.
Urgent and Unimportant (a phone ringing is a good example): this is where many people loose a tremendous amount of time
Urgent and Important (A broken bone or crime in progress) hese immediately demand our “focus”
Not Urgent and Not Important: pure time wasters- not a good place to invest much energy
Not Urgent BUT Important. This is the area Steven made a point of saying that most people fall short. Because these things are not urgent, we tend to put them off and not invest enough enough energy into them, but since they are important this means we pay a hefty price in the long run. Into this category he puts things like our health, important relationships, personal development and self improvement to name a few.
When we choose what to focus our energy on, we would do well to direct as much of it as possible to these types of activites