Time Management Matrix

Many students complain that they don’t have enough time to join school organizations, to do a part-time job, to be in love, to work out regularly, or mingle with different friends according to their heavy academic work load. However, some students still can take those things done well and get good credits from various courses at the same time. In the past, I was like the aforementioned students and was really curious about how some people could accomplish many things simultaneously. Was it just because they were smarter than me? No, I never believed it. In order to find out the answer, I tried to contact various people and extracurricular activities including school clubs, part time jobs and study groups and, what is more, falling in love during sophomore year. Then, I truly had much fun and made a lot of friends from those activities, but in the mean time I got poor academic performance as a result. I felt so frustrated and thought I was undoubtedly a stupid guy until I learned some time management skills, such as keeping the schedule, writing down the to-do list, organizing the file system etc. Among these many skills, I have found that Time Management Matrix is the best way of arranging one’s time to do proper thing effectively.

     Doing right thing adequately is much more important than doing wrong thing beautifully,” said Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University Professor famous for his “Last Lecture.” This means setting a personal goal is always the first thing to do. The reason is that setting a concrete goal will make you suddenly realize that time is so finite for you to accomplish all the things you have to or want to do. According to time limitation, you should find out which things are really worthy to do or urgent to do. There is a well-known rule called Pareto’s Principle (20/80 rules), it says “80 percents of work give 20 percents results; 20 percents of work give 80 percents results.” In other words, if you do the right things, you will work less but get more accomplishment. I learned Time Management Matrix (see Figure 1) from the book First Thing First, definitely can help you arrange tasks and goals systematically and concentrate on essential things. Time Management matrix focuses on two dimensions: the urgency and the importance of the tasks. As it turns out, the matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants so that the user can easily understand which things should have more priority than others or which things could be put aside until leisure time. Below are the details of each quadrant..

 

Figure 1. Time Management Matrix

     As you can see in Figure 1, Quadrant 1 represents urgent and important goals which are also called “firefighting”, because the activities in it are very important and need to be dealt with immediately. If there are many tasks in this quadrant, you will definitely work hard and feel stress. The best example for students is that there are always several term papers, exams or final projects due near the end of semester in this quadrant, and all of them obviously make students feel stressed.

     In comparison with Quadrant 1, the activities in Quadrant 4 are neither urgent nor important, and are regarded as “time wasting.” These activities usually consume a lot of time, but do not move you toward your goals. Unfortunately, most of daily activities of many students are fallen into this quadrant, because they are generally easier to do and students have less stress with them. For example, playing computer games, watching soap operas or TV series, and reading comic books are all popular activities for students. Those activities, however, have no contribution to their goals, but will make them feel anxious. Because it is usually two or three hours passing unknowingly, yet they have not done any task.

     It is not difficult for students to distinguish between the priorities of activities in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 4, but which one is the second priority after Quadrant 1 always makes students confuse. In fact, most students would like more to do the activities of Quadrant 3 than Quadrant 2. Quadrant 3 is “distraction.” The activities in it must be dealt with right now, but frankly they are not important. It is interesting that a lot of students consider Quadrant 3 should be done first. They think, “Ok, this is not important but urgent, so I have to work on it.” For instance, many students usually answer the phone call or MSN, or check out their e-mails frequently, when they are studying or doing homework. Though they may feel busy and self-fulfilled, the truth is not much progress to their goal. That is to say, the noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance.

     Conversely, Quadrant 2 includes activities that are important but not urgent and called “Quality time.” As the matter of fact, what your attitude to this quadrant is the key factor that determines how you feel when facing a lot of tasks. The reason is that many Quadrant 1 activities could be reduced by allocating time in your diary to carry out the Quadrant 2 tasks at your best(In this respect Quadrant 2 may be even more important than Quadrant 1). To illustrate, if we keep surveying the related materials of the term paper or review the lecture notes every day, we will feel confident to face the term papers and exams at the end of semester while others die hard.

     During the sophomore year, I always felt busy but I still could not do things well, because I spent a lot of time on Quadrant 3 & 4 activities, such as playing computer games, hitting the bar, chatting by MSN and fooling around with diehard followers. Although doing those activities really gave me fun, I always felt empty after the activities and slept not well. The Time Management Matrix helps me to readily arrange the limited time to do proper thing. When I consciously strive to maximize Quadrant 2 time, it really helps me to achieve some goals or dreams which I never thought I can fulfill so quickly, such as publishing my research on an international conference, conquering Mt. Jade and Mt. Xue, and even acquiring the ability of English writing! Though being a master student makes me busier than before, I can extract some time to do what I want to do and, more importantly, still have fun! If Time Management Matrix gives me so much time and fun, I am sure it can give you the same benefits.