The late Dr. Stephen Covey suggested that one of the biggest problems with our current world is that people are reactive and not proactive. This is because the systems we get into fail to give us the time to prioritize our most meaningful life tasks by keeping us in a rush with arbitrary deadlines and busy work. He asks us to consider not only the urgency but also the importance of those things we do each day. To help us better understand this, he asks us to categorize each task into one of four quadrants: Important & urgent, important & not urgent, not important & urgent, and not important & not urgent . He believed that many of our problems stem from not putting time into those tasks which are not urgent, but which are nonetheless very important. Traditionally, this may have been the essence of the sabbath-but now even Sundays are hectically busing with pressing logistics. Dr. Covey asked us to have the courage to say “no” to pressing things in order to spend some time each week on those things (in Quadrant II of the image below) that are not urgent, but still important in the long term.
