by Haven Logan PH.D

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your
schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

--Stephen R. Covey

        

I have always been quite religious about writing resolutions before the stroke of midnight New Year’s Eve. Friends remember me scribbling my resolves with great urgency on cocktails napkins at parties long ago. If I had saved all these earnest testaments to good intentions they would surely wallpaper my office. Some resolutions I have actually managed to keep. I paid off my credit card bills. I lost ten pounds one year. (If I gained it back again the next, does that still count?)

This year I decided to rethink the whole notion of New Year’s resolutions. Are they helpful or not? Why are they so hard to keep? I always envied those who would make only one resolution each year. How much easier to keep one resolution, than to keep my usual catch-all list of self-improvements.

The real problem with resolutions is LIFE. You start off in January determined to exercise five days a week. You have it all planned out and know how good it will be for you. You make it through the first three weeks, and then wham! The flu hits you. You start to get better after two miserable weeks when the flu moves on to the rest of your family whom you now have to attend. How could you leave them to go workout? By the time they recover, it has started to feel nice to collapse on the couch after work. You see the list of resolutions pasted on the wall. March 1st you’ll start. Once again you make it out the door and soon notice how much better you feel after exercising. All is well until that work project or special event comes along which absorbs every extra minute of your life. Exercise again disappears. You’ll get back to it when this is over. Won’t you? Finally, it’s summer. With the longer days you can even exercise at 9 pm. Piece of cake, you’re on a roll. Then a bomb drops. You’re injured or receive notice of a serious health condition. Maybe you can’t exercise for a while or that resolve to exercise just doesn’t seem to matter any more. There are so many more important things to take care of. Anyway, Thanksgiving is coming up and everyone knows the rest of the year is a loss for keeping any resolutions. You’ll just wait until January 1st to get back on track.

New Year’s resolutions are really about setting priorities. As such, they can provide an important road map for the use of your time and energy. They require stepping back, however, to examine what is important to you. It helps to look at priorities from three perspectives: long, intermediate, and short term. Long-term priorities are those things which stretch out for many years, such as saving for retirement. Intermediate term priorities are those you might put in place as New Year’s resolutions. Often they reflect steps on the path to your long-term priorities such as starting a 401K to save for retirement. Finally, come the short-term priorities—what you are going to do today and tomorrow. This could include balancing your bank accounts or moving money to your retirement account. Again, how do these daily activities match up with what you have said are your long-term priorities?

Once you have set your priorities, it is essential to constantly evaluate whether your behavior is in line with them. Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” has a concept called the “Quadrant Theory” which helps with this evaluation. Covey advises dividing all your activities into four quadrants.

Quadrant # 1- Important and Urgent (crises, pressing problems, dead-line projects)

Quadrant # 2- Important, Not Urgent (preparation, prevention, planning, relationships)

Quadrant # 3- Urgent, Not Important (interruptions, some phone calls, meetings, mail)

Quadrant # 4- Not Urgent, Not Important (trivia, excessive TV and video game playing)

Obviously, you need to attend to those things that occur in Quadrant 1. Some of them might be avoided if you spend more time in Quadrant 2 on prevention and planning. In the narrative above about exercise, you might have avoided some of the crises by getting a flu shot, being more proactive on projects at work, and taking better care of your health before it reached the stage of illness or serious injury. Many of us stay swept up in Quadrants 1 and 3 because they are what is happening now. Quadrant 4 could be called “just goofing off.” When we spend the day there we rarely feel satisfied. Quadrant 4, however, is not the same as doing things that we value and bring us great pleasure. Playing a sport we love or reading an enjoyable book are activities which could better be put in Quadrant 2.

The challenge for all of us is learning to spend the majority of our time in Quadrant 2 doing the things that are important to us and not urgent. Much of this time will need to be spent building and maintaining relationships. The rest will be devoted to other activities that are important to us. Since each of us has only twenty-four hours in a day, spending more time in Quadrant 2 will require spending less in the other three quadrants. This shift requires discipline, planning, and a good deal of saying “no” to the trivial time-robbers in our lives.

Take some time at the beginning of this new year to think about and write about your priorities. Then place your priorities and activities in Covey’s Quadrants. See which of your unimportant activities you might do away with or limit. Then think about how you could schedule into your days and weeks those important and none urgent priorities which you keep putting on the back burner. It is your life and you deserve to spend a good part of it doing the things that are truly important to you.