Four quadrants of your desktop

A friend of mine had this interesting suggestion for personal effectiveness in 2008: Use the Covey idea of Four Quadrants of Activity Management on your computer's desktop. 

1. Save this Four Quadrant image as your desktop.
2. Drop your active work (files) onto the four quadrants
3. Work on the Important-Not Urgent and Important-Urgent activities in much larger proportion to your Not Important-Urgent and Not Important-Not Urgent tasks. 

Of course, this works well when you are heavily file-centric in your work.  I note that most email applications let you drag and drop messages, but that would be a little cumbersome on the desktop.  Just imagine doing this within your mail app too!

Here is a sample of the results (click for full image).  I might leave all the applications off the quadrants.  But placing them in the Not Important-Not Urgent quadrant is probably a good idea.