Covey’s Seven Habits for the Digital Agency – Habit 3: Putting first things first
What is the most important thing you can be doing right now? We asked ourselves that question in the studio as we munched Cocoa Pops during our recent studio breakfast session reviewing Covey’s Habit 3: Putting First Things First.
The take-away diagram from Habit 3 places everything we do in one of four quadrants based on how urgent or important the action. Some examples of activities in these quadrants include:
- Quadrant I: Urgent and Important
Proposal due today, a client’s website is offline, a network server blows a motherboard, a programmer scheduled to deploy a system calls in sick - Quadrant II: Not Urgent and Important
Building an internal scheduling system to avoid conflicts, writing procedures to improve quality, installing hardware for fall-back on failures, cross-training staff for redundancies. - Quadrant III: Urgent and Not Important
Reports to clients that will not get read, phone calls from suppliers offering development resources in India, requests from potential clients asking if we want to build an iPhone game at no charge for a cut in the profits of a $0.99 download. - Quadrant IV: Not Urgent and Not Important
All-staff email chains containing pictures of the directors superimposed on 80’s boy bands, “researching” the latest tower defence Flash game, whatever has changed in the last 30 minutes since you last looked at news.com.au, 80% of the Internet and 90% of Twitter.
Contributing Quadrant IIs
If you find yourself focusing solely on Quadrant I activities, ask yourself if there was a Quadrant II activity you could or should have done to avoid doing the Quadrant I activity. For every ten Quadrant Is, there is usually only one or two underlying Quadrant II. Once identified, put in an action plan. As you put the plan in place, hold onto the hope and reality of change, as it can take some time to implement and you may be in the cycle of Quadrant Is a while longer.
Competing Quadrant Is
Prioritising is difficult when everything is urgent all the time. If you feel you just can’t get to it all, you are probably right. Getting out of panic stations is a two-step process. First, get your Quadrant Is under control. In our situation, despite all best efforts, deployments may not be picture perfect and issues can come from all directions. When this happens, it is all hands on deck to get the critical issues under control.
The second stage is to implement short and long-term Quadrant IIs. Again, seek help in not only identifying the underlying Quadrant II activity, but allow for your ego to be set aside to allow someone else to implement. You may be the best one to wrap up panic stations while someone else with an outside perspective addresses the underlying root cause.
Hidden Quadrant IIs
Activities in Quadrant III and IV should not be dismissed off hand, as they may be miscategorised. Seemingly mundane activities such as chats in the kitchen or games during lunch build capital in the studio that you will need to draw from when times get tough. If the focus is always on work, you get a worn out team.
Be aware of prioritising your own down time in Quadrant II. This is a fine balance, as it is easy to put aside what needs to be done with the justification that “I deserve this.”. Often, our quadrant IIs don’t get done simply because we don’t like to do them. As mentioned, perhaps try to find those who can support you in this. Even if they don’t like the tasks either, misery loves company and you can plough through together.
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