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Using RTM priority to model Covey's qudrants

chris089 says:

If you read on personal productivity, it's highly likely you've heard about Stephen Covey's four quadrant matrix as a tool for prioritizing your tasks. If not, here's the short summary:

For each task, decide if it is a) important or not and b) urgent or not. Draw four quadrants on a piece of paper and put everything that's important and urgent in the first, important but not urgent in the second and so on. Covey argues we are likely to neglect those tasks that are important but not urgent, so remember to do them after the important and urgent ones.

Today it occurred to me, that this can perfectly modeled using the priority feature of remember the milk - it has exactly four states (1 / red ,2 / dark blue ,3 / light blue and 0 / white). Until today I just used my gut feeling to prioritize my tasks, but I will now decide using a well-known system: For each task I ask Covey's questions and assign priorities accordingly. This will ensure that I will not neglect the tasks from quadrant #2 as RTM will order them above #3 tasks.

Posted at 9:37am on March 24, 2013

mikejd30 says:

This slightly misses the point of Covey's approach though I think. As I understand it, for example Important and Urgent are treated as two separate task identifiers.

So you might assign a new task as Important, and then after decide is it Urgent or not. The Importance is unlikely to change, but the Urgency might. If you use 4 priorities, the way of thinking is different as you are simply given a 1-4 level (not letting the matrix decide based on what you considered Important in one moment and perhaps Urgent or Not urgent in another.

I hope I'm making sense here.......... The point is, most task system have priorities. But there is a different between that and what Covey suggests.

Therefore, I say using 4 separate tags would be a better approach, therefore being able to choose first what is important and after what may be urgent or not.

Posted 1 year ago

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