I recently read an article in Harvard Business Review titled Help Your Overwhelmed, Stressed-Out Team (source: https://hbr.org/2015/01/help-your-overwhelmed-stressed-out-team?)

Helping teams cope with and remove excessive stress most definitely can help improve organizations.  After reading the article, I found myself thinking about the work of Steven Covey. Many years ago (late 1980s and early 1990s), Covey, author of the "Seven Habits" series of books posited that all our time falls into one of four quadrants delimited by columns labeled not-urgent and urgent and rows labeled not-important and important.

Covey argued that we tend to spend too much of our time in the "urgent but "not important" quadrant and too little of our time in the "not-urgent but important" quadrant.  Yet, it is in the "not urgent but important" quadrant where great and meaningful things are accomplished professionally and in our personal lives.  

Covey also noted that time management practices focused on prioritizing and calendarizing (allocating time for) tasks principally based upon urgency.  Covey argued that people needed to shift their planning timeframe from "today" to a far longer perspective so that we changed our perspective of "priority" to include the "important but not urgent" matters. 

I recall a carton that depicts several "cave men" pulling a wagon with four square stone wheels. As you can imagine this required a lot of effort.  Following the wagon was another cave man carrying a "round" wheel. This cave man is saying "try this new wheel, it will make your job pulling the wagon much easier."  The cave men pulling the wagon responded "we don't have time try anything new because we are busy pulling this wagon.

Ironically, despite Covey having "discovered" these important points about making time for the important but not urgent matters (and having made a lot of money teaching others about this) decades ago, I wonder why these principles haven't gained traction? Is it a lack of time? A lack of interest? Or are the ideas simply flawed?

Any ideas on why these ideas didn’t gain traction and what we could do differently today in order to feel comfortable allocating time to the important-but-not-urgent?