Covey

If you’re like me, you’ve seen many wonderful change initiatives start off strong only to be abandoned and forgotten after a few years. How can we implement change that lasts? In their book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, McChesney, Covey, and Huling describe a process that can help any organization make change stick over the long haul. We've implemented their 4-part strategy as a MinistryLift team and it has provided us with consistent traction toward our goals. Here's how it works:

Discipline #1 – Determine Your Wildly Important Goal(s) (WIGs)

“Don’t ask ‘What’s most important?’ Instead, begin by asking, ‘If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?’”¹ 

With WIGs, less is more. If you have 2-3 goals, you are likely to achieve all of them. If you have 4-10 goals, you will likely achieve only 1-2 of these goals. With 11-20 goals, you will probably achieve none of them.

In MinistryLift (a ministry dedicated to providing non-formal training to churches), our WIG for this year is to increase participation by 50% in our five training ministries (live participation in training events, video views in our Resource library, blog views, and engagement via Facebook and Twitter).

Discipline #2 – Act on the Lead Measures

As we think about achieving WIGs, it’s helpful to differentiate between lag and lead measures. Lag measures capture what has already happened and what we can no longer control. For example, with the MinistryLift WIG, we can look at data from the past to see how we’re tracking in each of the five training ministries. Lag measures are important. Yet, if we want to accomplish our WIG, we need to be proactive and take steps that move those lag measures in the right direction. These steps are lead measures (what we can control moving forward).

Every person has their preferred way of keeping their to-do list, but what most systems don’t have is a way of defining what item gets priority. Is your list arranged by importance, deadlines, or what’s easiest to do? The danger of not accounting for priority is that you might think you had a productive day, when you actually didn’t gain any ground on your most important assignments.

I recently adopted a new way of tracking my tasks that is based on Stephen Covey’s third habit in his popular book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In order to “put first things first” Covey suggests using four quadrants to organize your responsibilities. I have been familiar with this concept for years, but had assumed his method worked best for big picture thinking and large project management. What I have found is that it works just as effectively for weekly to-do lists.

Covey’s Time Management Matrix captures how people spend time. The two defining factors are urgency and importance. Urgent matters require immediate attention, such as an approaching deadline or a ringing phone. Urgent things are usually visible and they act on us.

Conversely, importance has to do with results. You can be assured that something is important if it contributes to your mission or the goals that have been given highest priority.

As a general rule, we react to urgent matters, but important matters require us to act. 

Take a look at the four quadrants below and think about how much time you spend in each quadrant.

Here is Covey’s overarching principle: “Effective people stay out of Quadrant 3 and 4 because, urgent or not, they aren’t important. They also shrink Quadrant 1 down to size by spending more time in Quadrant 2.” 

But how can we do this? It wouldn’t be healthy to radically alter your approach to time management overnight, but there are gradual steps you can take to use your time more effectively.