Now that we have gone over how to identify the urgency and importance of tasks and put forth prioritization strategies, there is a temptation to delete the unimportant tasks and focus only on the important ones. Is this good enough? What is not important to one person may be a critical game-changer for someone else. Is it fair to delete something just because it is not important enough for you to work on?
The 4 Ds is a classic task filtration process. It stands for Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer. These are the four things that you can do with any task. Obviously, when some tasks are deleted, some delegated, and some deferred, considerably fewer tasks will remain to be done.
Let's see how this relates to the prioritization steps.
Quadrant IV tasks (Not Important, Not Urgent) and Quadrant III tasks (Not Important but Urgent) may be deleted except if the task is important to someone else. If it is important enough to someone else, it may be delegated.