Urgency-Importance Revisited or the Covey-Rotter Quad

I was going through some old posts on my blog for my book the Entrepreneurial Engineer and found this (here) somewhat different take on Stephen Covey’s famous urgency-importance distinction.

In The Entrepreneurial Engineer I talk about Julian Rotter’s work on the distinction between those with internal versus external motivation. In Stephen Covey’s famous book, he talks about the distinction between matters that are urgent versus those that are important.  The connection between these two authors is this. Matters that are urgent are important to someone other than you (externally motivated) and matters that are important get their importance because they are consistent with your internal motivation and goals. Saying this out loud helps highlight the point Covey was making and helps us name the quadrants of his famous urgency-importance square. Here in deference to Rotter’s earlier work, we call the diagram the Rotter-Covey Square and name the four quadrants something other than I, II, II, and IV.

Read the whole post (here) & take a look at the The Entrepreneurial Engineer on Google Books or Amazon (here).