I’m sure many of you have heard of Stephen Covey’s time management practice where your time can be spent essentially in four “quadrants.” The box should have “urgent” and “not urgent” across the top along with “important” and “not important” across the left side.
So things fall into either Quadrant I: Urgent and Important, Quadrant II: Not Urgent but Important, Quadrant III: Not Important but Urgent, or Quadrant IV: Not Urgent and Not Important.
The idea is that you should keep your work in Quadrant II as much as possible, keeping up with things that are not urgent but are important. Obviously this isn’t exactly feasible on a day to day basis; however, at Gatorworks we take time out each quarter to focus solely on our Quadrant II time. We did just that last Friday downtown at D’Agostino’s Restaurant. D’Agostino’s was a gracious host in that they opened their restaurant earlier than they normally do on a Friday to accommodate our team.
Our meeting consisted of opening remarks by myself on our company’s current state, and then each member of our team had the opportunity to talk about specific goals they have set for themselves for the next 3, 6, and 12 months. We discussed the specific actions necessary to achieve those goals, as well as assigned specific target dates for completion. This is a technique I have learned from my involvement with Entrepreneurs Organization (EO), and I have enjoyed implementing it at Gatorworks. Spending Quadrant II time on your business seems like common sense, but it becomes so hard for many businesses. They tend to spend time just reacting to the day-to-day happenings of business rather than taking time out to address the bigger picture items. So, our “Quarterly Focus Plan” meetings at Gatorworks forces us to focus on Quadrant II time at least for a day so that we can get back on track and remind ourselves our greater goals. We enjoy a real open relationship among our team members, because after all our employees are our greatest asset!
And of course, our round-table discussion of nearly 4 hours culminated with a tremendous dinner and then a lovely time enjoying the Baton Rouge downtown nightlife!