What Contentment Areas Are Most Important to You?
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
In my article How to Flex Your Quadrant II Muscle, I discuss Stephen Covey’s four quadrants of time management which categorizes your tasks:
- Quadrant I: Urgent and important tasks (e.g., crises, emergency meetings)
- Quadrant II: Not urgent, but important tasks (e.g., proactive goals, planning and prevention)
- Quadrant III: Urgent, but not important tasks (e.g., irrelevant meetings, unimportant emails/messages)
- Quadrant IV: Not urgent and not important tasks (e.g., avoidance activities, time wasters)
The model, also known as the Eisenhower Matrix (thanks to some readers for pointing that out!), was foundational in helping me minimize time-wasting activities and not get distracted by non-important tasks. More importantly, it helped me to allocate time to focus on things that are important but not necessarily urgent. It was groundbreaking for me and has helped me immensely ever since I implemented it over 30 years ago.
Because I feel this is so important in how we all manage not just our careers but our lives, I want to share with you my quadrant II (Q2) list and give you a boost on how to think about your own Q2 items.
Before I get to my list, I’d like to walk through how I think about what I call my nine contentment life areas, as follows:
- Career contentment - How content you are in your current and future career potential
- Family …
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"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's; it is so loud, one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what you say." - Oscar Wilde |
