Level: Intermediate
Age: Adult
Discuss before you watch
1. How hard/ easy do you find it to prioritize your work?
2. What impact do you think that being good at setting priorities has on your overall success at work?
3. Do you make a to-do list each morning?
4. How do you prioritize your tasks?
5. How can you tell something urgent from something important?
You’re going to watch a short presentation by Jim Tatem, who runs business training programs.
Fill in the quadrants below with the numbers and examples given.
Now, discuss your answers with a partner.
FOCUS ON PREPOSITIONS
Fill in the blanks with a suitable preposition
1. It’s important to discern ________________the urgent and the important items.
2. “Let’s take a look________________ our first example.”
3. An example of something urgent would be a ringing telephone where the customer is ________________ the phone or is coming into the store.
4. We need to focus our time, effort and energies ________________ quadrants #1 and #2.
5. The mail carrier coming ________________the store might be something that must be dealt with ________________ that very moment.
6. Spending time ________________ the Internet or surfing the web fall into quadrant #4.
7. There are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important________________ effect.
8. Label all of those things on the list you’ve made and concentrate __________________ things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2.
Provide examples of your own using the expressions in bold.
FOCUS ON VOCABULARY
Collocations
These are some common collocations associated with the video. Join with arrows and say how they relate to what Jim says.
1. Set a. your work/ your tasks
2. Make b. a vital role
3. Prioritize c. on the latest news/ statistics
4. Develop d. the phone
5. Play e. a to-do list/ a purchase of equipment
6. Attend f. priorities/ goals
7. Spend g. a skill/ an ability to do something
8. Label h. to somebody or something
9. Catch up i. time/ money
10. Answer j. the items on the list
Words & Expressions
Do you know the meaning of the idiomatic expressions below? Spot them in the video and try to work out what they mean. Then join them to their definitions.
1. TAKE SOMEBODY OFF COURSE a. advantage
2. DAY IN DAY OUT b. in the wrong direction
3. WHETHER OR NOT c. immediately
4. PAYOFF d. continuously for a long time
5. RIGHTAWAY e. used to introduce two possibilities
Writing
- Write a summary of Jim’s presentation using as many of the words/ expressions seen above.
Speaking
- Fill in the quadrants with examples that might be relevant to you and your work. Then present them to the class
Follow up
Related articles
PAIR WORK: You can ask students to read one of the articles above at home in order to present it the following class.
KEY
FOCUS ON PREPOSITIONS
Fill in the blanks with a suitable preposition
1. It’s important to discern __between__the urgent and the important items.
2. “Let’s take a look_____ at__________ our first example.”
3. An example of something urgent would be a ringing telephone where the customer is _____ on______ the phone or is coming into the store.
4. We need to focus our time, effort and energies ____ on____ quadrants #1 and #2.
5. The mail carrier coming __ into_______the store might be something that must be dealt with ______ at___ that very moment.
6. Spending time ___ on____ the Internet or surfing the web fall into quadrant #4.
7. There are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important____ into______ effect.
8. Label all of those things on the list you’ve made and concentrate _ on______ things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2
FOCUS ON VOCABULARY
Collocations
1. f 2. e 3. a 4. g 5. b 6. h
7. i 8. J 9. c 10. d
Words & Expressions
1. TAKE sby OFF COURSE b. in the wrong direction
2. DAY IN DAY OUT d. continuously for a long time
3. WHETHER OR NOT e. used to introduce two possibilities
4. PAYOFF a. advantage
5. RIGHTAWAY c. immediately
Script (by Marcela)
Welcome to “Your motivational minutes”. Today’s topic is urgent versus important.
One of the key skills to develop the ability to discern between the urgent and the important items, between those things that are going to take me off course and those things that are going to help me build the business from where I am to where I want to be.
In order to do that, we’ll take a look at the four quadrants that play the most vital role here: those items that are urgent or not urgent and those items that are important or not important. And to do that let’s take a look at our first example: Quadrant #1 where we find items that are urgent and important.
And example here would be a ringing telephone where the customer is on the phone or is coming into the store and is saying “I must speak to the business operator”. Obviously our customers are very important to us and that matter that needs to be attended to, is as a matter of fact very urgent. So, this is something that we would tend to.. and this happens to us day in and day out when we’re operating on business.
The second quadrant, quadrant #2 are for those items that are important but not urgent. This is where the biggest payoff is but unfortunately, where we have a tendency to spend the least amount of our time. When we’re talking about urgent, not urgent and important items, what we’re specifically saying is the long term planning, the goal setting, the evaluating the employees, the evaluating of my pricing, determining whether or not I should make that next purchase of equipment. Those are things that impact the long term success of my business so, therefore, they are important but very rarely are they very, very, urgent.
What we’ll find is that the most times what we need to do is we need to focus our time, effort and energies on quadrants #1 and #2.
Now, when we’re looking at quadrant # 3, there we’re gonna find things that are not necessarily important but they are urgent. So for example, the mail carrier comes into the store today, drops off the mail for the day, that’s something that’s urgent, It’s happening right now but is not necessarily important that I deal with it at this very moment.. Or, for example, just any ringing telephone. A ringing telephone is screaming “Answer me” and therefore, it becomes urgent but again, is it important that I as a business operator answer that phone or is it more important that I have someone in my store delegated, in my business delegated to make sure that that phone gets answered in a timely fashion. Again, that’s not something that I necessarily need to do.
And that brings us to quadrant #4. Not urgent, not important. Examples here might be for example spending time on the Internet or surfing the web or just catching up on the latest sports statistics or highlights. Now, again we’re not saying that you shouldn’t have relationship building going on with your staff, etc, etc, but we do wanna make sure that we’re..??? of the time that we’ve been given and, therefore, we’re focusing most of our time, as we said earlier, on quadrant #1, the urgent and the important, and quadrant #2 the not urgent and not important and we’ll leave quadrants # 3 and #4 alone.
So here are 2 performance points that you can use right away to put urgent vs important into effect.
#1 make a list of all the things that you need to do and #2 label all of those things on that list #1, #2 #3 or #4 and then purpose yourself only to concentrate on things that would be in quadrant 1 or quadrant 2.These have been “Your motivational minutes” thanks for joining us.
