The Market Quadrant… Are you spending your time effectively?

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Good morning. As I’m writing, it’s 6:42 Pacific Daylight Time on the 2d of May 2009, and a very murky sky greets the sun as it rises over the East Bay Hills. It looks like something is burning, but Santa Barbara is too far away and the wind is wrong to be locally affected by the Jesusita fire.

But it’s otherwise clear and beautiful as I sit at the table pondering exactly what to do today. I’ll be putting a couple scheduled hours into hRecipe of course, but other than that, I’m having trouble figuring out which of about 100 open task tickets in my Trac log I want to knock out (definitely something I can do in less than 2 hours).

One the one hand, there’s too much to do… on the other hand, I get up when I want, have no commute, and frankly, don’t really have to do anything at all if I don’t want to. Being an entrepreneur is so cool.

Let’s put on some trip hop and get to work. Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines” is a current favorite. I get a nice stereo effect from the bass lines coming through the Harmon speakers hanging off the Airport and the high notes coming out of my tiny little laptop speakers. Working from home is so cool!

Let’s get on with it!

First stop: see what’s burbled up to the top on Trac. The deadline for WordPress In An Afternoon is creeping up fast, so the Covey time management report seems appropriate.

What’s urgent? What’s important?

You know, I don’t really care. “Urgent,” “important,” whatever. I could give a rat’s patootie about either. I wanna have fun and make money!

The Market Quadrant

That reminds me… I wrote a blurb a while back about being smart versus being dumb. Or dumber. Or even dumberer. Let’s see how that fits in with “fun” and “make money.” Let’s say “fun” is stuff you like to do and “not fun” is stuff you hate to do.

And making money requires that other people want your stuff.

Sorting it all out, look like we have a “market quadrant” here:

Dave’s Market Quadrant		You
Dave’s Market Quadrant		☟you hate it☟	☟you like it☟
Your market	somebody wants it ☞	dumb They call it “work” for a reason!	smart! you’re an entrepreneur and work for yourself, or you’re an employee where the responsibilities are accompanied with the required authority, and you have enough autonomy to get the job done. Rare.
Your market	nobody wants it ☞	dumberer Total waste of time. Doing it because you have to. Meeting terms on an onerous contract, where the product or service is irrelevant, and politics reigns supreme.	dumber Self-indulgence. Trustafarians sometimes live here. Good work if you can get it.

That was easy!

Now, it’s time go back through Trac and update all the tickets with some new custom fields: fun/not fun and marketable/not marketable.

And by the way, if you suspected this article is the promised followup to my article on Covey’s and Blanchard’s time management grids, a gold ★ star for you!