Are your urgent tasks really important?
“I have a million things to do and they are all due by the end of the week”. How often do you hear this from your colleagues or how many times have you found yourself in a similar situation? Today, most of us have more than one (more often three or four) tasks that run concurrently and need our attention. And what we often end up doing is running after deadlines; work long hours in order to meet them, stress, fatigue, hours away from our families, errors, omissions and lower quality of work. When doing so, one common mistake we do is we tend to focus on urgent activities or anything indicated “urgent” and leaves important tasks behind. Therefore, urgency wins over importance. The separation of urgent from important is something many people don't realise. So what can we do to avoid being caught up in the urgent “net”? First we need to clarify the difference between the urgent and the important tasks.
An Urgent task is a deadline based task. This is usually not determined by you and is often driven by others. The sooner the task needs completion the more urgent it is. This has no relation to importance.
An Important task is independent of ‘urgency’ and is what you want to do, not what time you actually spend on it. For any task the quality of your output will often relate to the time you spend on it. Important things bring you benefit. They can also lead to hazard or danger if you don't do them. Importance has nothing do with "how soon". The important tasks are the ones that bring your organisation closer to achieving its goals.
Steven Covey in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” gives a solution on how to prioritise the work that is important but not urgent . Though this is hard to do on any given day, it is the only way to ensure you are making progress towards your own goals and dreams, instead of merely reacting to what other people throw at you.
And while this system may seem too black and white, with real life examples it gets simpler. If someone telephones you for urgent information you are not likely to put them on hold while you try to figure if it is an urgent or an important task.
Some tasks can be urgent and important. For instance, while you know that you may be having cholesterol problems, you may defer a visit to the doctor or a health check which is very important. Then you get a stroke or heart attack which makes a consultation with a doctor urgent. If you had done these health checkups regularly and beforehand, it would have been just one of those other things in your to-do list. They became urgent because you ignored them.
So, what would you rather do? The check up or the treatment after the damage is done? In our Time and Performance Management programme, the model by Steven Covey and other prioritising techniques could give you insight on how to deal with important things before they become urgent in order to have fewer ‘urgent and important’ tasks to deal with.
Marina Xenophontos Michaelou
Programme Director
“I have a million things to do and they are all due by the end of the week”. How often do you hear this from your colleagues or how many times have you found yourself in a similar situation? Today, most of us have more than one (more often three or four) tasks that run concurrently and need our attention. And what we often end up doing is running after deadlines; work long hours in order to meet them, stress, fatigue, hours away from our families, errors, omissions and lower quality of work. When doing so, one common mistake we do is we tend to focus on urgent activities or anything indicated “urgent” and leaves important tasks behind. Therefore, urgency wins over importance. The separation of urgent from important is something many people don't realise. So what can we do to avoid being caught up in the urgent “net”? First we need to clarify the difference between the urgent and the important tasks.
An Urgent task is a deadline based task. This is usually not determined by you and is often driven by others. The sooner the task needs completion the more urgent it is. This has no relation to importance.
An Important task is independent of ‘urgency’ and is what you want to do, not what time you actually spend on it. For any task the quality of your output will often relate to the time you spend on it. Important things bring you benefit. They can also lead to hazard or danger if you don't do them. Importance has nothing do with "how soon". The important tasks are the ones that bring your organisation closer to achieving its goals.
Steven Covey in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” gives a solution on how to prioritise the work that is important but not urgent . Though this is hard to do on any given day, it is the only way to ensure you are making progress towards your own goals and dreams, instead of merely reacting to what other people throw at you.
And while this system may seem too black and white, with real life examples it gets simpler. If someone telephones you for urgent information you are not likely to put them on hold while you try to figure if it is an urgent or an important task.
Some tasks can be urgent and important. For instance, while you know that you may be having cholesterol problems, you may defer a visit to the doctor or a health check which is very important. Then you get a stroke or heart attack which makes a consultation with a doctor urgent. If you had done these health checkups regularly and beforehand, it would have been just one of those other things in your to-do list. They became urgent because you ignored them.
So, what would you rather do? The check up or the treatment after the damage is done? In our Time and Performance Management programme, the model by Steven Covey and other prioritising techniques could give you insight on how to deal with important things before they become urgent in order to have fewer ‘urgent and important’ tasks to deal with.
Marina Xenophontos Michaelou
Programme Director