True Love & Effective Time Management

Today I’d like to share two very different and simple thoughts that have been on my mind from the well-known leadership book called “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey. 

#1  “Love is a verb, not a feeling.”

My only daughter started middle school two weeks ago and with this age comes the beginning of a wonderful world of boyfriends and girlfriends and thoughts of “love.”  Much of the media we consume inaccurately portrays love as a feeling that comes and goes.  It shows that we “fall” in and out of love almost haphazardly and that love is something we have no or very little control over.  It is normal to feel love for someone today and then not tomorrow.  This type of love is not really love at all. 

True love is a verb, it requires action.  When we love someone we sacrifice for them, we look out for their best interest, we help them, support them, serve them, stand by them, etc.  For this reason we don’t really “fall” out of love.  If we feel we’ve lost love for someone it is because we have stopped doing those loving actions that demonstrate our love and produce loving feelings.  We have made the choice to stop loving.  Therefore, if we want to feel love, than we must take actions that produce it. 

#2  “Focus on what is important and not urgent”

Everything we do falls in to one of four categories or quadrants.  We have things that are (1) urgent and important, (2) not urgent and important, (3) urgent and not important, and (4) not urgent and not important.  Most of us spend our time in quadrant (1) and (3) with things we feel are urgent.  This causes us to constantly run from fire to fire doing urgent things that we eventually get burned out and spend the little bit of time we have free in quadrant (4) which adds no value to our lives at all.  This is pretty typical for most of us. 

Highly effective people however have the discipline to spend a lot of their time in quadrant (2), on things that are important but not urgent.  This are typically the most important items that bring value to our lives such as spending time with our children or family.  Though this is extremely important, it rarely ever becomes urgent. 

The problem with spending most of our time in quadrant (1) and (3) is that we end up sacrificing what is perhaps most important to us.  We never get around to those very important items that are never urgent.  We must remember that when we make a choice to say “yes” to something, it also means we are saying “no” to other things that we could be or maybe should be doing. 

Think about how you spend your time and if the things you are doing are in quadrant (1), (2), (3), or (4).  Learning to use our time wisely and focusing on those items in quadrant (2) will help us be more effective and more successful people and leaders.