The Four Quadrants: what you love, like, dislike and hate about your week

The Four Quadrants is a quick, honest stocktake of how you feel about the things that fill your time. You sort your meetings, tasks, chores, people and commitments into four boxes, Love, Like, Dislike and Hate, and then look at the pattern. It draws on values-clarification practice from coaching, cognitive behavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy, and most people find two or three things they could change with very little effort.

Why is it so hard to decide what to change?

"Change your life" is an enormous thing to take on, and enormous things have a habit of being postponed until next month, and then the month after that.

So instead we put up with things. The Tuesday meeting you dread from the moment you wake up, the committee you joined four years ago and have been trying to leave ever since, and the commute you've told yourself is fine, really, because you can listen to podcasts.

None of these things is a crisis on its own. Together, though, they can add up to a week you don't much enjoy, and it's very hard to change any of them until you've admitted, to yourself at least, how you really feel about them. That honest admission is often the moment things begin to shift.

What is the Four Quadrants exercise based on?

It comes from values-clarification practice, which goes back at least to Values Clarification, a 1972 handbook by Sidney Simon, Leland Howe and Howard Kirschenbaum. Their book was full of practical exercises to help people separate what they genuinely value from what they've simply inherited along the way.

Modern therapies picked up the same idea. Acceptance and commitment therapy, often called ACT and developed by Steven C. Hayes, puts values at its centre and describes them as chosen directions you act on day to day. Cognitive behavioural therapy uses similar sorting exercises to help people separate what they do from how they feel about it.

The principle underneath it all is a kind one: you can't decide what to change until you've said, honestly, how you feel about what you're already doing.

How does the Four Quadrants work in PiViva?

You take the things that fill your actual week, such as meetings, tasks, chores, people and commitments, and sort each one into Love, Like, Dislike or Hate, with up to fifteen items in each box. You can drag things between boxes whenever you change your mind, and you almost certainly will.

Honesty matters far more than tidiness here. Putting something you're supposed to enjoy into Dislike can feel a little naughty, and it's often the most useful thing you'll do in the whole exercise.

Your score is the share of items sitting in Love, so it rises as the balance shifts in your favour. The number matters less than the pattern, though, so it's worth spending a moment with what's sitting in Hate. Some of it may be unavoidable, at least for now. Some of it you may have agreed to years ago and never revisited, and some of it could be delegated, dropped, or done quite differently after one friendly conversation.

What if everything feels like Dislike?

Then that's important to know, and it's worth taking seriously and gently.

A good place to begin is with the smallest item you could move. Most people find two or three things in Dislike that would shift with a single email or phone call, and doing those first can change how the whole week feels surprisingly quickly.

If the pattern points at something bigger, such as your job, Values Clarification can help you see what matters most to you, and Ikigai can help you think about work in particular. If you'd like to talk it through, Viv is there whenever you need, and so are the coaches in the PiViva Coach Directory.

Run the exercise again in three months and compare your Love column with the one you have today. You may find that a few items have moved up a box or two, that one or two have disappeared from your week altogether, and that the things you love are getting a little more of your time. Small changes add up, and it's very encouraging to watch that column grow as your week begins to feel more like your own.