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The Importance Paradigm
We would like to request you to think back and evaluate your activities in the last week. In which quadrant majority of these activities fall in? How many of you are ready to prove us wrong if we say that these activities must be in quadrants I and III?
We would like to revert your attention now to the three questions we asked you some time back. In which quadrants do you think majority of your honest answers fall in? Are we wrong if we say, quadrant II?
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Yes. These answers are the activities, which are important to you. So why aren’t you giving enough attention, care and time to these activities? Probably because they are not urgent or you are so besotted with the thrill of handling urgency / crises, that you have decided to compromise on what is important to you. But you must understand that even if these things are not pressing and not acting on you, you must act on them.
When we operate out of the importance paradigm, we usually are in quadrants I and II. We almost never visit quadrants III and IV.
As our objectives and goals are clear and we are ready to spend more time in preparation, prevention and planning, we are managing our time in an effective manner. Even the nature of quadrant I activities change. More often than not, we are there by choice and not by default.
In short, taking the analogy of medicine, we would say that the “urgency” is the treatment and “importance” is the prevention. Treatment deals with the acute or the painful level of illness, whereas prevention deals with life style issues and the maintenance of health. Even though the doctor may operate out of both these paradigms, but one paradigm usually predominates.
In the next section, we would like to go beyond the acute pain of the problems caused by our urgency addiction and into the chronic, underlying causes.
The ideas in the next few pages may challenge your thinking but we would request you to deal with these ideas on an introspectory level. The paradigms emerging from these ideas will empower you to put first things first in your life.
