How to Stop Procrastinating: a simple Guide to Mastering Difficult Tasks and Breaking the Procrastination Habit

Quadrant 3 (Q3): Urgent but not Important
Quadrant 3 (Q3) tasks are the “delegate it” tasks, because while they seem
urgent, they can often be automated or passed off to someone who is
better qualified to handle them.
This is the quadrant for those tasks that, in hindsight, turned out to be
not very important. Taking on Q3 tasks often occurs when someone asks
you to do something that does not directly benefit you or get you closer to
achieving your goals. For Q3 tasks, it’s important to learn and remember
how to delegate certain things.
When you think something is urgent when it isn’t, it’s usually caused by
an outside source of distraction—like checking your email or phone or
responding to people as soon as they try to contact you. You may think it
is urgent at the moment, so you stop what you’re doing to tend to the
matter, but in retrospect, the task wasn’t that crucial.
If you’re in the middle of working on a project and the phone rings, it’s

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not important for you to answer it. So, you can delegate this task to
someone else. It may seem urgent while it is ringing, but a task like this
can usually be handled by other people. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about
how
later in the book.)