The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

What is urgent and what is important?

It is not that dif­fi­cult to deter­mine how urgent a task is. If there is not a lot of time until it needs to be done, it is urgent. And if there are few­er hours than you need to com­plete the task until the dead­line, then it is very urgent.

Deter­min­ing how impor­tant a task is can be some­what trick­i­er. Too many peo­ple I meet judge tasks to be impor­tant at ran­dom, thus ren­der­ing the whole method quite use­less. If we put a lit­tle edge to this ten­den­cy, it is as if they are think­ing ​“it is urgent, there­fore it is impor­tant, since it’s urgent”. Think­ing this way will make every­thing urgent and impor­tant, and every­thing — every­thing! — will need to be grant­ed the high­est pri­or­i­ty. All the time.

Impor­tant means con­tribut­ing to goal attainment

This is one of the rea­sons I wrote my book on pri­or­i­ties (my sec­ond book which has not been pub­lished in Eng­lish yet). In this book, my main argu­ment is that the tasks which con­tribute to us reach­ing the goals we are respon­si­ble for attain­ing are those we should con­sid­er impor­tant. Look­ing at it that way, the urgen­t/im­por­tant-method sud­den­ly becomes a very pow­er­ful tool to pri­or­i­tize accu­rate­ly when we have a lot on our plates and need to choose the right thing to do next. The tasks that con­tribute to you attain­ing your goals and which are also urgent are the ones with the high­est priority.

And then there’s the excep­tion, right?

When I held a lec­ture a few weeks ago on this top­ic to a group of man­agers at one of the nation­al author­i­ties, I got a most inter­est­ing question:

“But there are plen­ty of oth­er tasks that sim­ply must get done right now — even if they don’t con­tribute to any spe­cif­ic goals! They don’t fit the mod­el. Where do they come in?”

As I see it: If we have decid­ed to, for exam­ple togeth­er with our boss, that these kinds of tasks should always be pri­or­i­tized above every­thing else, then they too belong amongst the high­est pri­or­i­tized tasks — regard­less of what goals, we are respon­si­ble for attaining.

It can get crowd­ed at the top

How­ev­er, if you fill the ​“quo­ta” with lots of these kinds of tasks, then you will still have too lit­tle time to work on the tasks that bring you clos­er to your goals.

For some peo­ple, that does not mat­ter and they are still right to pri­or­i­tize using the excep­tion to the rule. If we have a posi­tion at work that requires us to be on our toes and chip in to help oth­ers often, then we need to have low­er ambi­tions in terms of what we our­selves are to accom­plish in oth­er, more long-term mat­ters that would con­tribute to us reach­ing the goals. We sim­ply need to have few­er or less ambi­tious goals.

If it’s impor­tant, shouldn’t it have a cor­re­spond­ing goal?

If doing these ​“sim­ply must”-tasks is that impor­tant, it is rea­son­able to con­sid­er if there should be a goal con­cern­ing han­dling these tasks suc­cess­ful­ly too, so that we know if we have done our job well or not. If we cre­ate a new goal for these tasks as well, they will have their right­ful place amongst the most pri­or­i­tized tasks (once they are urgent, of course).

Do this

Take a moment to con­sid­er the tasks you have on your list which for some obvi­ous rea­son ​“sim­ply must” get done — with­out them nec­es­sar­i­ly con­tribut­ing to you attain­ing any of the goals you are respon­si­ble for.

Make a list of the tasks and ask yourself:

• Which of these tasks should have a cor­re­spond­ing goal so that I know if I am doing them in a sat­is­fac­to­ry manner?
• Are there just a few of these tasks, which means I will have enough time to do my ​“actu­al­ly impor­tant” tasks as well? 
• If there are quite a num­ber of them and not enough time to do every­thing, which ones do you need to get rid of? 
• Do you have any ​“sim­ply must do”-tasks on your list that some­one else could do instead?
• Do you have any goals that are just there out of old habit and which you might actu­al­ly let go of, thus giv­ing you more time to do the ​“on your toes”-tasks?

Con­scious­ly instead of conjectured

If you bring out these ​“sim­ply must do”-tasks into the light (and bring them to the atten­tion of your boss as well), it will become eas­i­er to make an accu­rate assess­ment of your actu­al work­load. That which is there will now also be seen and rec­og­nized, instead of being some­thing that does not real­ly count, even though it tends to skip the line and be pri­or­i­tized above all your oth­er tasks.

You will be able to deter­mine what real­ly mat­ters and thus should be deemed impor­tant, make sure that you have appro­pri­ate goals attached to these tasks in order to clar­i­fy your progress and suc­cess, and you will have more time to work on what has now been defined as important.

What’s it like for you?

What kind of ​“sim­ply must do”-tasks do you have on your list? Give me an exam­ple! 

(Speak­ing of pri­or­i­ties, it’s essen­tial to set the goal first and pri­or­i­tize lat­er.)