How to Achieve Higher Levels of Productivity with Covey’s Matrix?

Managing time effectively is super important as a professional or a business user, whether operating a start-up or an established enterprise. It’s even more critical if you are running a small business with limited resources.

Despite our best efforts, we still get to the end of the day without achieving the tasks we set at the beginning of the day, whether due to procrastination or bad task management. Many applications, tips, tools, and printed material deal with time management, but most seem to overcomplicate things. However, Covey's Matrix stands out as the go-to time management set of principles that all business owners can benefit from.

Simply put, Covey's Matrix allows you to visualize how you spend your time and where you spend it, making it an approved tool across product managers and management consultants.

This blog will look at the fundamentals of Covey’s Matrix and some technology that can help users achieve higher productivity levels.

What is the Covey’s Matrix?

Covey's matrix is a box divided into four quadrants, with each quadrant representing how your tasks should be divided up, according to how important and how urgent they are. As imagined by Stephen Covey, the long-term goal is to understand the need to work on tasks that look urgent but are not important. The Covey Matrix categorizes tasks across two continua, are they "Urgent" and are the tasks 'Important'. Users are then able to understand whether tasks are urgent or not (See below image).

The four quadrants, as a whole, represent the time that you have available to you. This time cannot be changed, but each quadrant can, depending on the amount of time spent in it. Generally speaking, you should try and move as much time as possible into quadrant 2 (Important - Not Urgent). This is where we need to put most of our efforts into achieving success while reducing time spent in the other three quadrants. It's simple but very effective. If you want to learn more, please refer to the article "How to Use Covey's 4 Quadrants Matrix for Effective Time Management" by Shan Abdul.

How Can Technology Help Us?

When it comes to time management and technology, they go hand in hand. Many applications in the market can help, but one stands out more than others - TimeCaptis. Available on iOS, Android, and a web app, TimeCaptis allows you to manage your time effectively.

How to Implement the Covey's Matrix in TimeCaptis

Create your To-Do list (a list of all the things you need to do, no matter how large or small) if you don’t have one. If you already have one, check to know which 'urgent and important' tasks need your attention first. Next, check which 'important but not urgent' jobs need to be scheduled. Next, check which 'urgent and unimportant' tasks you should either delegate or do in your low-energy hours. Finally, check which jobs you should just delete and reorganize your existing To-Do list based on Covey's productivity quadrants illustrated above.

Create and Manage Your To-do List in TimeCaptis

Using the to-do feature, you can easily create and manage multiple to-do lists and tasks in TimeCaptis.

To create a to-do list, click on the 'To-Do' link from the selected team from the list of teams appearing on the left sidebar menu. For example, the 'My Personal' section will display only the personal data you have entered into that team, which cannot be shared.

On the 'To-Do List' page, click on the 'Add To-do List' button and create one or multiple lists.

On the 'To-Do List' page, click on the respective to-do list to add to-do item(s) to it.

To add a to-do item to the selected to-do list, click on the 'Add to-do' button.

You can update the to-do lists and move items from one list to another.

You can easily sort the items on the lists by dragging them and can prioritize them. Once you have completed an item or a task, you can mark it as completed.

As a final remark, please remember that it is essential to learn how to manage your priorities and resources because we can't make more time, but we can use it smartly to be more productive. Covey's matrix is one of the most critical and famous models to help you be more productive if followed correctly. If you are still unsure, try it out for a week. Then, make a list of your tasks for the week, sort them inside the matrix using TimeCaptis to track your progress throughout the week, and take notes (TimeCaptis also allows you to manage your notes).