Urgency vs. Importance: Avoiding the hamster wheel of time.
The critical battlefront in the time management game is the conflict between the urgent and the important. This conflict and resolving it is the crucial factor in determining whether we move ahead in our business and life or get trapped on the great hamster wheel of time.
To-do lists are notorious places to find “Urgent” activities. These are the things that must get done today. The grocery shopping for tonight’s dinner, the bills that need to be paid today lest we get a late penalty, the appointments we must make because they are part of our job, or business or mandatory to our family life. These are the things that make up the majority of most people’s lives. And what’s left is filled in with the routine. The teeth brushing, paper reading, evening news, midnight snack and their zillions of cousins.
We allow our lives to be filled with these because they are “normal” daily activities and the urgent things we need to attend to. What usually gets left out are the important things, things that are deferrable because they are not urgent.
Tax planning for example could assist you in saving significant sums come tax time, but for many will be put off until tax time, when it is too late, but is urgent.
One of the most common difficulties for people attempting to get a better handle on their time is the finding of time to plan their day, or their week. The urgency of their day gets in the way. I’ve got to do this, I need to be there, all take priority over taking the time to sit down and spend 15 minutes writing today’s list of urgencies and scheduling some time to focus on something important.
Planning is important. Imagining is important. Meditating can be important. Researching can be important. Writing a new book or article, or building a new product, or planning a marketing campaign, or learning a new skill, or building a web page, all can be important, if they serve to advance you personally and/or your business to a higher level of productivity and profit.
A sales call is vital to the ongoing success of your business. Mapping out a new marketing campaign could help all future such calls be more successful. The first, the routine sales call is urgent. The mapping out of the marketing plan is important. They both should be done. They both must be done. But for many of us, the urgent encroaches on the time available for the important.
A glitch occurs and you are delayed 15 minutes in traffic, you need to adjust your schedule and move that 2:30 appointment into the time you were going to sit down and do some long term planning. The important once again loses out to the urgent.
The picture for many of us is bleak. Our calendars are filled not only with today’s urgencies but also a backlog of several days of unmet urgencies we are struggling to catch up on. How can we possibly break through and eliminate the urgencies? Well the truth is we can’t. The urgencies will always be there. If you let them, they will also take up as much time as you permit them to. Which is, usually, as much time as there is.
The critical underlying secret to time management is to understand that you must make a decision to make time for the important. And the first important step is to set aside some time to plan. And you need not to just plan you day, but your week and month, if not beyond.
When doing so, take a moment to decide is an item is important or urgent. Recognize that things can be both. Focus first on the urgent important. Then the urgent followed by the important. The goal of time management is to find ways to compress the urgent and routine to make time for the important.
It’s not necessarily easy. But it is important. So recognize that among your urgent important tasks each day is to plan your day. Do it first. And make sure your find a time each week to plan your week. That too is important but need not be done every day. But it is urgent that it be done every week.
In my next blog post I will begin discussing the nitty-gritty of planning you week, and then your day. We will explore the idea of a mental lock box I learned from Mark Joyner.