Steven Covey’s famous 4 quadrant assessment of work is a vital tool. To make REAL progress on freeing yourself from the stresses of your BV business, you must make time to solve your problems at their root. Every owner who’s honest with themselves knows that.

Use Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants of Time Management matrix to stop wasting time

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, famously offered his “Four Quadrants of Time Management” matrix to help busy professionals and executives identify how they’re spending (wasting?) their time.

For a refresher, the four quadrants are:

1: Urgent and Important: These are the issues you need to address today, the client or project deadlines, the crises that should have been solved yesterday. They’re often one-off tasks you don’t see coming.

2: Not Urgent but Important: This work might consist of larger projects you can schedule out according to a timeline. Or it might involve efforts that yield long-term results, such as developing skills and cultivating relationships. You don’t need to do this work today, but you can’t put it off indefinitely.

3: Urgent but Not Important: This is the most annoying quadrant, home to many meetings, emails, and tasks that other people are fired up about but that really contribute nothing to your core mission.

4: Not Urgent and Not Important: Shopping for a new desk chair. Tidying up your workspace. Figuring out what’s wrong with the darn coffee machine, again. These feel important, and can feel urgent, but in the grand scheme of things? Usually, they’re not. Tackle them when quadrants 1, 2, and 3 are clear.

The tasks at a business valuation firm sometimes come at you fast and furious—especially if you own the shop. The Covey quadrants can help sort and prioritize. And sorting and prioritizing can make possible a rare and wonderful thing when you’re down in the trenches: perspective.

When you see your to-dos grouped together in their quads, patterns emerge. Pay special attention to Quadrant 2. Do some problems come up over and over again? Are you reinventing the wheel with each new project? Are a number of issues being generated by a single deficiency, such as outmoded software or not having enough staff?

If you can see it, you can fix it. If it looks like having some extra hands would clear up a few of your quadrants—or make them less crowded—you can prioritize bringing in new staff. At Assurent Advisors, we help business valuation firms outsource tasks to reliable workers to help them clear up their schedules.