Time Management Tip: Sorting you daily tasks based on importance and urgency

Picture a graph (like a big plus sign) where the horizontal axis represents a scale from critical on the left to non-urgent on the right; and where the vertical axis represents important at the top and not important at the bottom. Now you will have four quadrants:
Upper Left: Important and Critical
Upper Right: Important but non-urgent
Lower Left: Not important but Critical
Lower Right: Not important and non-urgent
Think about all the tasks that you do and list them in the appropriate quadrant. Where do you want your efforts to be? Most people guess that it should be in the first one listed (Important and Critical) but that means that you are constantly “fighting fires” or “solving crises.” You can be much more effective and efficient if you focus on the second quadrant where you are working on important items that have not yet been allowed to hit the critical stage. Hopefully obvious to everyone is the fact that you should minimize or even eliminate things that are in the last quadrant.

Manage your daily tasks. Don’t let them control you.