Habit 3 from Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits for Effective People" focuses on prioritizing tasks using a time management matrix. The matrix divides tasks into quadrants of urgency and importance - the ideal is to spend most time in the "prosperity quadrant" of important but not urgent planning tasks. Covey encourages managing daily urgent tasks efficiently, minimizing inefficient tasks, and eliminating wasteful tasks to better focus on important planning and relationship-building work.

1. 1
Habit 3 Put First Things First
Adapted from
Stephen Covey “Seven Habits for
Effective People”
Habit 3

2. 2
Habit 3 Put First Things First
In Habit 3 Covey highlights the
importance of prioritising your
tasks
and provides a time
management
matrix to help you do this.
Look at the time management
matrix, think about where
you spend most of your day?
Covey encourages us
to spend more time in the
planning
quadrant or what he describes
as
the prosperity quadrant.
This is quadrant 2.
I Survival
• Crisis
• Reactive problem solving
• Deadline-driven projects
• Meetings
• High-Level demands
• Preparation
‘manage’
II Prosperity
• Preparation Tasks
• Prevention Tasks
• Value clarification
• Planning
• Relationship building
• People Management
• Empowerment
‘plan’
III Inefficiency
• Some phone calls
• Needless interruptions
• Unimportant meetings,
phone calls and mail
• Unnecessary reports
• Drop in visitors
• Other peoples minor issues
‘minimise’
IV Waste
• Trivia, busy work
• ‘junk’ mail/calls
• Time wasters
• Idle gossip
• Irrelevant mail
• Escape activities
‘eliminate’
Low Importance High
High Urgency Low

3. 3
Habit 3 Put First Things First
Consider what you can do to manage the
day to day important survival tasks,
minimise the tasks that are not important
and therefore inefficient use of your
valuable time, and then plan to eliminate
the wasteful non important tasks facing
you each day.