Thoughtful Thursday

The Urgent and The Important

When we determine our priorities, it is important to keep in mind the difference between two kinds of tasks. Some tasks are urgent and some are important.

The urgent task needs to be completed soon. Anything with a deadline eventually becomes an urgent task.

The important task is the one that really matters. Completing an important task is something that you can be proud of. Fulfilling important tasks can also lead to other important tasks.

In most cases there is no clear distinction between the two. In fact, what procrastination does is make a task both important and urgent. And some things are neither urgent nor important; these tasks are wastes of time.

Urgent tasks can exert a negative influence over your schedule if you allow them to take over. When your schedule becomes filled with nothing but urgent tasks, you lose freedom to choose what action you are going to take. In many cases, this leads to important tasks being put off until never.

The solution is to take care of trivial things before they become urgent. When this is done, the important things can be given their proper attention before they too become urgent.

Consider the task of writing a book. Depending on your values, this might certainly be an important task. Unfortunately, writing a book is not something that most people can do in a few hours, days, or even weeks. So, in order to achieve the important goal of writing a book, time and effort must be allotted to that task while taking care of the urgent goals that come up. The important goal cannot be achieved without handling the urgent first.

But, the urgent goals must not overwhelm the entire space of the day so that the book never gets written. If the urgent goals do overwhelm the important, eventually the completion of the book will become urgent as the publisher comes knocking on your door. Obviously, the quality of the book will suffer as the task becomes urgent.

The key is to find the balance. Since everyone's priorities are different, this balance will be different for everyone.

The key points are:

- Take care of the important before it becomes the urgent
- If you're sacrificing the important for the sake of completing the urgent, refocus your priorities
- If you are having trouble completing everything on your schedule, find and remove the tasks that are neither important nor urgent