I recently have been reading Dave Ramsey's book entitled EntreLeadership.  Ramsey references a time management matrix that was originally created by Stephen Covey in which Covey breaks up a leader's time into four queadrants and asks the user to populate the quadrants with their own customized tasks.  This is intended to help the executive prioritize her time.  

I had just participated in a project whereby others were asked to Crowd-Source a BYOD policy for a school.  My mind works in interesting ways to connect material of different sorts.  I thought to myself as I was pondering tayloring the time management matrix for my own use, "Why not Crowd-Source a Time Management Matrix?"  I had also recently been pondering the use of Yammer as a means of making our instructional leadership team's thoughts visible to all our stakeholders.    All of these Ideas sort of came to a Eureka moment while driving home from a movie (The Odd Life of Timothy Green - I highly recommend it).  

I ask for your help in crowd-sourcing a time management matrix.   I will, of course, share the results with everyone here when the project is complete.  If you would like to participate in Crowd-Sourcing a Time Management Matrix (One for Principals and One for Teachers, respectively) then I ask for you to please read on.  

First, you have to know the difference between

Important and Urgent

Important and Not Urgent

Not Important and Urgent

Not Important and Not Urgent

In his best-selling book “The seven Habit of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey introduces the Time Management Matrix:

Quadrant 1: The important and urgent items that need to be dealt with immediately. The best example of this is when nature calls. You need to go to the restroom ASAP. Another example is when you need to put out fires in your school due to problems that got bigger because it wasn’t addressed at the onset.  

Quadrant 2: The important but not urgent items that don’t require your immediate attention. This is where you deal with things that are important to your values and goals. This is the quadrant that you need to plan for. The urgent things are usually what keep us away from doing the important things. THIS IS THE QUADRANT WE SHOULD FOCUS ON as Instructional Leaders a vast majority of the time.

Quadrant 3: The unimportant and urgent items that should be minimized or if possible, eliminated from our list. A good way to avoid this is through planning and delegation to assistant principals, secretaries, and support staff. 

Quadrant 4: The unimportant and not urgent items, the time wasters.

As you focus your time on Quadrant II, it keeps you aware that picking tasks on a day-to-day basis should be aligned to help your future.

Remember that putting the most important things first every day is the purpose of time management. For me, those things are all instructional leadership centric and include the development of my teachers and staff. 

I have created a google document (one for principal's and one for teachers) so that you can participate in helping me (and others that will received the information on this website and my over 1,000 twitter followers) create this  Matrix which I believe will help me (and others) focus on the main thing.   

Thank you for helping me "Keep the Main Thing - The Main Thing."  

Crowd-Sourced Principal's Time Matrix Google Form

Crowd-Sourced Teacher' Time Matrix Google Form 

If you are following me on twitter (@tra_hall) I wil also be posting these links via a tweet.  

Please allow me to thank you for your assistance in the Crowd-Sourced Document.  I look forward to the results!