Today we finish discussing the last two quadrants from Stephen R. Covey’s Time Management Matrix.

Now, on to quadrant III: these are tasks imposed on us by others. They occasionally become necessary to somebody, but not necessarily to your problem. We all know how friendly the guy next door gets when his fax machine breaks down, or how insistent door-to-door salesmen can be when they haven’t made their quota. When people start knocking on the door with all their little emergencies for you to handle, it is important to remember and live by the old adage: “Failure to plan on your part does not necessarily create a crisis on mine.”

We’re all hit with this. It’s important to realize that although you can’t help everyone, it is a valuable and important use of time to help some people, sometimes. Actually, it’s worth your time to help out as often as you can. In this way, you’ll develop relationships of trust and respect, and trust relationships are always an asset.

The key is to make sure you do what you can and not what you can’t. If you have the time, energy, and resources to help someone out, then by all means, help! If taking time away from the most important task at hand seriously injures your venture, then don’t do it. You need to achieve this important balance through practice and planning.

Finally, quadrant IV—the fluffy, fun quadrant IV, activities that are neither urgent nor important. Examples would be useless, mindless, endless video games and television shows. Don’t get me wrong; I’m up for some good TV shows or a fun game every once in a while, but if you’ve just finished 19 straight hours of Seinfeld reruns, you’ve got a problem. You are not producing, growing, or creating. You are simply existing.

Recreation is important and, when used for the purpose of recharging yourself and spending time with family and loved ones, it can often fit into quadrant II. Watch yourself, though; it’s easy to get sucked in.

So how do you identify quadrant IV at the office? Check your chat applications; do you chat with other people hourly? How meaningful or useful are those conversations to your strategy? Do you spend a lot of time online without needing to? I’ve even caught people watching DVDs or playing video games during “productivity time.” Statistically, Covey states that most people spend all their time in crisis mode, switching between quadrants I and III. The real power comes when you’re able to spend 80 percent of your time in quadrant II, 5 percent in quadrant I, and 15 percent in quadrant III.

As you find yourself scurrying around the office in pursuit of your busy work, keep these thoughts in mind and develop the discipline to say to yourself: “Back off here. This is a waste of time.” This ability is extremely powerful.

Finally, you must remember that you possess limited time and resources with which to accomplish your goals. Identify critical tasks and organize yourself around them. If you organize yourself, you will be able to lead a team of people confidently, competently, and consistently. Your team is obligated to develop their own critical reasoning so that they can make judgment calls as well, but it all starts with you.

Obviously, using this strategy requires prep work. I’ve found, however, that it doesn’t necessarily need to take a lot of time. The clearer you are with what you want to accomplish, the more quickly you can put a strategy in place and develop it within your team.

Porter’s Points – Urgent and Important

• When you are continually approached with quadrant III activities, learn to say “no.” Try something like, “Thank you so much for thinking of me, but this time I am going to have to pass.”
• Gather your thoughts. Take time to record your goals and the critical milestones involved in achieving them.
• Prioritize a series of tasks necessary to implement your strategy. Timing is essential in priorities. For example, you may need to finish developing a product before creating the marketing materials so that your marketing reflects the product as accurately as possible.
• Choose three important things to do today–and do them. If you have time for others, great; if you run out of time, rest assured that they will be there for you tomorrow. Mountains are climbed one step at a time.

And with that we’re done with Chapter 10: Motion or Momentum?  Next time we’ll start my favorite chapter of Bootstrap Business – Chapter 11: Climb High, Sleep Low.

Today we introduce the tool mentioned last time, the Time Management Matrix, that will help you as an entrepreneur to prioritize your tasks throughout the day.

The most powerful tool that I’ve found for sifting through piles of tasks is Stephen R. Covey’s “Time Management Matrix.”[1] I do not claim any credit for these ideas but can definitely attest to their usefulness. This section is an explanation of how I have applied these concepts to my business practices.

The Time Management Matrix

More information on Covey’s “Time Management Matrix” can be found in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (149-156).

Covey labels these quadrants with numbers and names; for example, quadrant I is “both urgent and important.”[2] I’ll start with a simple example of how quadrant I works. Let’s say you walk out into your front yard and see your child step off the curb directly into the path of a speeding truck. This situation requires you to take action immediately. It wouldn’t matter if the phone started ringing or you had left something boiling on the stove; all of your attention would shift to preserving your child’s life.

Take that principle into a business environment, and it is incredibly surprising the variety of emergencies that can occur. I had a quadrant I situation in my office the beginning of last week. I had just finished up SEO work on a famous musician’s web site. The project was completed by the Friday afternoon due date, but we had a call on Monday morning advising us that we had worked on the right artist but the wrong site!

It wasn’t our fault (the error grew out of a miscommunication between the two companies), but it resulted in my team starting from square one that morning, all of a sudden having two weeks worth of work to complete in just one. Our focus immediately jumped to correcting the oversight and getting ourselves back on track. The project hadn’t even been on our to-do list for that day, but as soon as the task arose, it became our highest priority.

In quadrant II we find tasks that are “the heart of effective personal management.”[3] These items are important but not urgent—for example, finding the time to have a talk with your kids about drugs when they get old enough to understand. This is very important but has no real external deadline. “Old enough to understand” is a pretty loose guideline; you could even have part of the talk at ten, some at eleven, some at twelve, and so forth. However, if you ignore this conversation until your child is old enough to encounter and experiment with drugs, the need reaches quadrant I and becomes a crisis. Learning to make time to deal with quadrant II keeps you from living life in a state of urgency.

In the business world, quadrant II reflects the heavy lifting between you and your goals. This is the tedious work that you assign yourself in order to achieve your dreams. Covey maintains that a successful life is one that works mainly from this quadrant. For an entrepreneur whose entire life and livelihood hinges on the ability to follow through with long-term goals, quadrant II must be the priority.

We’ll cover quadrants II and IV next time – see you then!

As an entrepreneur, it’s critical that you know how to act, rather than just react.

As a child, I loved spending time at my grandparents’ farm. They had a little flock of about 50 guinea hens that I always made sure I “accidentally” encountered as I walked through the garden to the barn. All I had to say was “boo,” and they would look at me, cock their heads to the side, and go “whah!” It started a chain reaction. The first one would squawk, then the next, and then the next, until they were all “whah!”-ing and squawking and running around the barnyard in a noise-making microbial-like mass. It usually took them about five minutes before they collected themselves, calmed down, and went back to hunting for bugs. Sometimes, as human beings, we do the same thing. Someone says something, and one-by-one we start reacting and working ourselves into-a-lather for no reason at all.

I was associated with a woman who was incredibly driven and dedicated to her work, but she was prone to react instead of act. She worked extremely long days and tortured herself by maintaining incredible motion with little momentum. She was the most energetic, sincere, and inefficient person I’ve had the pleasure to encounter.

She was a wonder to watch, running here and there, sometimes jumping in her car and whizzing away just to whiz back and run around again. The police even had a hard time keeping up with her, but she had enough speeding tickets to prove that they caught her now and again.

This woman eventually ran herself into the ground by working like a guinea hen. She wore herself out and felt the need to choose a new, “relaxing” lifestyle. It would have made such a difference for this bright young woman if she would have just taken the time to organize and focus her energy and stop when other necessities (like sleep and composure time) became more crucial. (See the following section, “Urgent and Important,” for tips on organizing and focusing your energy.) This woman ignored the fact that sleep and downtime became quadrant I priorities and, instead, she burned out.

Don’t react. Plan and then take action.

In my current office suite, I have a great office with an elevated 20-foot ceiling. My window looks out over a golf course and then off to the distant snow-capped mountains. I love it and won’t leave it, but there is one problem: my door is right next to the entrance to our suite.

Everyone who stops by sticks their head in to say hello and chat for a bit. Even if no one actually knocks on the door, someone walking by is enough reason for me to lift my head and lose my focus. When I’m involved in a critical task and can’t be interrupted, I leave my office and head down to the “war room,” another office down the hall with the same beautiful view but far from any of the daily foot traffic.

This doesn’t just make me more effective, though; this works for everyone. The best way to keep a team of engineers from reacting to every distraction is to locate them in the back offices and give everyone else the directive to leave them alone (except to slip a pizza under the door every once in a while). When it’s time to get down to work, you must eliminate distractions and start acting on your project instead of reacting to whatever crosses your path.

Porter’s Points – Act or React

• Eliminate distractions. Find a workspace more conducive to concentration or a way to limit the noise around you. Do what you have to do to get done what you have to get done.
• Set a regular time each day to check and respond to your email and voicemail. Don’t react to it all day long as it comes in.
• Turn your cell phone off or put it on vibrate and set it aside when you are in a critical work mode.

As Rich mentioned, we’ll introduce the Time Management Matrix next time so you can sort tasks according to their urgency and importance.

As promised, today Rich shares his secret of ‘walk and talk’ meetings and why they can be so helpful for your small business momentum.

In business, surprises are never good—even when they are a good surprise. Good or bad, you’ve done something wrong if you didn’t see it coming.

When I was the general manager of About.com’s Web Services division, I found myself working with a group of brilliant engineers. Despite their brilliance, one of the challenges the group faced was a continuous breakdown in communication. Management would give direction to the engineers on a project, and the engineers would then disappear into their cubicles for several weeks to work out the details.

It was like waiting for a baby to be born—boy or girl? Ten toes and fingers? Pretty or ugly? They would surface several weeks later and present their interpretation of what they had been asked to create. Sometimes, it would hit the mark; oftentimes, it would not.

After several of these “little surprises,” I established weekly “Walk and Talk Meetings.” Some organizations share a common problem: they talk, talk, talk the day away and never get down to work. This is not good. My division had the opposite problem; the engineers would go off on a long “walk, walk, walk,” reaching a destination (the surprise product or feature) that no one wanted in the first place. When I realized this, I created a new approach for our team: “Walk and talk, walk and talk, walk and talk.” Walking and talking involves frequent, brief check-ins to keep everything on course. We would touch base in a way designed to keep everyone moving in the right direction together, avoiding the need for major course corrections.

It sounds simple, but it became a weekly ritual that was not only productive but fun. I ended up tying rewards to it, setting benchmarks and then springing for group lunches or handing out incentives upon completion. This dramatically increased productivity and stopped our brilliant engineering group from wasting energy.

Porter’s Points – Walk and Talk

• To avoid surprises in your business, keep tabs on all assignments that you hand out. People quickly lose interest and momentum, though, so keep this contact brief and to the point.
• Come to meetings with goals made and plans in place. If something doesn’t help you toward a goal, don’t use it. Talk things over with your team, then make decisions quickly but wisely and make sure everybody understands the plans and goals.
• Some teams come with a little bit of inertia. Use reward systems to kick-start your own walking and talking. This will encourage the appropriate behavior and keep the inertia from settling in as you roll forward.

As an entrepreneur, do you typically act or react?  We’ll talk about the difference and why it’s important to distinguish between the two next time!

A great way to make sure that you’re exerting momentum, and not just motion, is to have and use a giant whiteboard for tracking your employees’ tasks.  Rich tells us just how to do that today:

I know a manager who insisted on having only stand-up meetings. If he couldn’t accomplish what needed to be done within five minutes, he wouldn’t meet at all.

My favorite way to handle meetings is to gather my team around a whiteboard and give each person a chance to answer the question, “What are your tasks today?” We all take turns writing a brain dump of each and every single item on our to-do list for the day. At this point, we don’t try to prioritize.

As soon as it’s all up on the whiteboard, we ask ourselves, “Which are the most critical items on the list? Which ones are vital to move us forward and make us successful?” Typically, 10 percent of the list ends up in this category, marked with a big, red A. The rest get marked as Bs, Cs, and on down to Ds, helping us organize precisely what we need to focus on.

We all have our favorite tasks, but we won’t get anywhere by just working in our comfort zones all day long. Using the whiteboard this way is like putting a steering wheel on your day—you steer the ship and sail each hour exactly where you need to go.

A nice side benefit to this exercise is that everyone has a good handle on what everyone else is doing. This enhances collaboration and community, and helps keep the energy up. It also provides a clear division of responsibility, prevents you from doubling up on the same tasks, and keeps your group from accidentally leaving some assignments untouched. Finally, it gets you back to work more quickly.

Porter’s Points – The Five-Minute Whiteboard

• How long do you spend in meetings each week? Cut that in half.
• Buy a whiteboard if you don’t already have one (and make it a big one). This way, everybody can see how their tasks tie into yours and yours into theirs.
• You will be tempted to coordinate and troubleshoot simply by using email. Save email for mundane needs; when it comes to saving time, focus on ensuring understanding. A five-minute, face-to-face session of whiteboarding can save a five-hour, frustrating flurry of emailing.
• When you whiteboard, you control your team’s momentum. Everybody has their to-do list, but you need to be sure that the A priorities drive your team to accomplish your company goals.
• Review that day’s or week’s goals before and after, allowing everyone to brainstorm so you can all get back to work with speed and precision.

So go get a whiteboard! And get ready for next time when we talk about walking and talking…

The first way we’ll discuss for increasing your momentum as an entrepreneur is the 80/20 rule.  If you’ve never heard of it, pay close attention  - it’s very powerful!

The 80/20 rule applies to every aspect of life. Twenty percent of your effort will bring about 80 percent of your results. I decided to apply this rule to my own life while in college. I was plodding my way through a brutal undergraduate program, working full-time, and trying to find time to kiss my wife more than just once a month. I was not willing to sacrifice my marriage because it was (and is) the highest priority in my life. I also had an understandable affinity for eating, so I had to keep my job. And, although it sometimes seemed like the only expendable option, I wasn’t about to give up on school. I was stuck.

After a soul-searching analysis of my dilemma, I was forced to prioritize and chose to become a B student. I realized that the majority of the semester’s points for any given course were in the main tests. The labs required extensive and timely work, but the points given by the professors for lab work were not as significant. I decided to whip through the labs and always turn something in but focus the bulk of my energy on doing well on the tests. I also chose to become a “9-5” employee, meaning that I did my job but did not put in the extra effort to further my career.

With my workaholic personality, this arrangement proved difficult at times. I had to make a deliberate decision to focus on the 20 percent of activities that would achieve 80 percent of the result. It took work, but I’m happy to report that I got back to kissing my wife more than once a month, I graduated from a difficult engineering program, and my career continues to advance—thus satisfying my affinity for eating.

As the CEO of a technology company, I had an employee named Daryl Guiver. He was a fine product manager and a meticulous worker. One afternoon, I was shocked to find that Daryl had put a sign up above his desk that read, “Strive for Mediocrity.” I had preached to my team to always do their best, so I was stunned he would put up something so bold and uninspiring.

When I questioned him, Daryl explained that he was a detail-oriented perfectionist. There was nothing mediocre about him. With all of his drive for perfection, however, he sometimes got lost in the details. When he was developing a product, he wanted every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted. He realized that this hindered his ability to get things done. By concentrating on hitting perfection only on the most important tasks, while settling for his definition of mediocrity on the rest, he accomplished much, much more.

Porter’s Points – 80/20

• What are your top three priorities in life? Do you have more than three competing for your attention? Start applying the 80/20 rule. Now.
• If you find yourself getting bogged down in details, ask yourself, “Is this getting me to my goal?” If the answer is no, move on. Quickly.
• Are you a perfectionist? Part of perfectionism comes from placing the same priority on each task at hand. Perfect the art of prioritization first. Burn through the less important tasks; focus your skills and resources on the more important ones.

Another great tool that every small business should have is a whiteboard.  We’ll learn why next time.

Today we begin Chapter 10: Motion or Momentum of Bootstrap Business: A Step-by-Step Business Survival Guide.  Ron opens the chapter with a discussion on the difference between motion and momentum.

Entrepreneurs must address some very vital issues in order to keep their psyche afloat. How do you avoid burning out? What steps do you take to make time for life and work? How do you stay motivated after a long string of 18-hour days? After all, there is only a fixed amount of time in which to accomplish everything you need to do in order to succeed.

In this chapter Rich articulates several essential strategies that will help you achieve laser focus and effective effort. Too much of our time is spent doing things that don’t matter, that don’t have positive impact on the desired end result. It all boils down to this simple but seemingly difficult-to-employ principle:

Motion is not momentum.

Do you remember the last time you walked into someone’s workplace (or your own) and witnessed activity like a beehive? Was it motion or was it momentum? Rich and I have both seen more than a few businesses exuding this type of motion. Everyone is rushing around with frantic looks on their faces, hauling files hither and yon, shuffling paper and guzzling coffee and colas as if their very existence depended on them. They look exhausted but quick-step between cubicles and offices performing tasks that appear to be incredibly demanding and important. At first glance, this is an impressive sight—busy people mean a successful company, right?

Peeling away the layers causes one to wonder: How many of these folks are just rushing around doing meaningless work? Rich and I have a friend, Brent Peterson, who calls this “fake work”. In fact, his book Fake Work will be released in early 2009. Fake work is pervasive in business. Will it be in yours? It will unless you learn to identify the critical tasks (those tasks that really support your strategic objectives), examine the timing required to complete them, prioritize them, and then execute on them. You need both to answer these questions for yourself and to coach your team to understand and act with this mindset.

Particularly in the early stages of a business, owners waste a bank-load of energy on countless unimportant tasks. It’s easy to get bogged down in emails, phone calls, lunch dates, and hollow meetings. Sometimes, owners attempt to “will their success” by forging ahead and throwing themselves in front of the bus. When we hear someone say, “I’m working so hard, I have to succeed!” we get a little nervous. They have confused motion with momentum and could very well work themselves into an unfruitful, frenzied failure.

Rich saw this firsthand while working in Japan. “I love Japan,” he told me. “I feel a deep connection to so many aspects of the culture. But one aspect that drives me crazy with many of the Japanese businesses is the wasted motion, physically and emotionally. Everyone shuffles around the office moving papers back and forth, acting busy. No one goes home until the boss goes home. Politics prevail, and no one speaks their mind or asserts a thought or opinion on the best way to get things done.

“After hours, though, that’s when the real work begins! They go to the karaoke and sake bars, get a bit tipsy, and all of a sudden have no problem saying what’s on their mind! Motion, not momentum.”

Starting and maintaining your own business requires hard work. Waves of pressure come and go, encouraging you to move faster and move forward. As they come, are you focused on the right actions, the key movements that will actually get you somewhere? Are you exerting focused energy? People thrive on habits. If you are used to a two-hour meeting on Tuesday mornings, it’s hard to let it go. But what if you don’t need it this week? Skip it!

The following sections will help you effectively move forward through the mire of motion and allow you to benefit from the miracle of momentum.

Ok, let’s admit it; we’ve all done it – fake work.  Rich and Ron call it ‘motion v. momentum’ but the principle is the same – being busy does not necessarily result in meaningful accomplishments, especially in the workplace.   I’m sure you know what I’m talking about and that you’ve had days running from dawn to dusk, one meeting after another, blackberry constantly buzzing.  How many times, at the end of one of those days, have you thought to yourself, “Am I making a difference for this company?”

One of Rich and Ron’s good friends, Brent Peterson, recently completed a book with Gaylan Nielson about this very subject – Fake Work.  The basic idea is that even though people may be working harder than ever, they are actually accomplishing less because their time and energy are not focused on the right actions – actions that are tied to the strategies of the organization.

Let’s take this to a personal level.  I’ve always assumed that being constantly connected and consistently in motion made me more productive, but is the work I’m doing fake work?  What does fake work even look like?  How can I recognize it so I know what to avoid?  According to the book, fake work can include meetings that waste time, meaningless paperwork, empty training initiatives, etc.  Sound familiar?

I took the test on the Fake Work website to determine just how little I am accomplishing.  I must admit I was a little apprehensive – it’s hard to take a test like that and not be nervous, especially when you know your bosses will see the results!  I don’t think I fill my time with fake work, but isn’t that the point Peterson and Nielson and Rich and Ron are getting at – you think you’re busy so you must be accomplishing something significant?  I am happy to report, however, that according to the results, I work in an environment that does very little fake work – that’s good to know!

In these crazy economic times, the companies that are going to survive will be those that are highly efficient and focus employees’ energy on strategic tasks.  There is no time for fake work in today’s economy!