The great life is achieved by doing the maximum Quadrant II activities and not letting the less important push them out.
Remember that Quadrant II activities have no urgencies, so you must proactively insert them into your schedule (see below!). And one of the results is that you will have fewer and fewer urgencies.
Quadrant I activities are driven by crises - stress becomes rampant and problems repeat themselves. Those crises wouldn't exist in most cases if you prepared ahead of time to avoid the crises and/or a way to deal with them effectively.
Quadrant II activities are:
Highest:
Very High
Prevention, Resolution
Solving immediately any problems that came up
Anticipating problems and designing prevention
Operating improvements
Designing better ways to do things
Figuring out how to do important activities better
Empowerment - Skill development, increasing productivity capability, deciding on practices to do regularly, training - highest skills are in managing one's life
Developing new habits and installing them
Planning
Actively prioritizing and scheduling the allocation of time
Values clarification
Essential: (This means "not optional"!)
Self-care
High
Those activities that produce the highest value, results in an area
Relationship building (but only in highest value relationships)
Preparation
Thoughtful, creative work
Productive collaborations
Some sub-examples are:
Listing and dropping your less productive activities, the Quadrant III and IV activities.
Listing your messes and incompletions you need to clean up - and inserting the top three into your schedule until complete.
TRACK THE TIME YOU SPEND IN QUADRANT II
You'll find that if you work on increasing the time you are doing Quadrant II activities a little bit a day, you'll find yourself with lots of extra time and fewer and fewer problems.
You will not have sufficient time in Quadrant II if you still have anxiety, stress, ongoing pressures, repeated problems and "fires". When you are calm, experiencing mastery of your life and its elements and things are running smoothly and effortlessly, you are spending sufficient time in Quadrant II. When you have reached that point, you will then use Quadrant II to learn to and implement even higher life value (not necessarily money or attainment type value, as that will not be of the highest value past a certain point).
WHAT TO DO NEXT