One thing all successful people do.

Important vs urgent in the battle to watch cat videos.

I’m going to make a few predictions about you. 

1. You’ve got lots of things you need to get done. 
2. Doing these things is how you’ll bring success and joy to your life. 
3. Your list of things to do is increasing faster than you can work through it.

You’re not alone if all three of the above assumptions ring true. 

There’s a piece of advice in Stephen Covey’s horribly titled book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, that lodged in my mind when I read it all those years ago, and I can report that it’s reliably followed by all the successful people I’ve ever asked about it.

Successful people do important things that are not urgent.

Covey elaborates the concept under the title ‘Put first things first’, but here’s how to make it happen. 

1. Make a list of the things you need to get done. All of them, from filing your taxes, to calling your sister in Manitoba.
2. Assign a value between 0 and 10 for how important each task is.
3. Assign a value between 0 and 10 for how urgent each task is.
4. Draw a two axis graph with importance on the Y axis and urgency on the X axis.

It’s important to resist the temptation to define the urgency until you’ve defined the importance of all tasks. Here’s a handy spreadsheet that you can use to automate the drawing of the graph.

When you split the graph into four quadrants by bisecting each axis equally, you now have four types of tasks. 

1. Top left — both urgent and important
2. Top right — not urgent, but important
3. Bottom left — urgent, but not important
4. Bottom right — neither urgent nor important

We naturally prioritize the work in the top left quadrant, that is both urgent and important. We’re under pressure to get the work done as a deadline looms, and it’s really important that it gets done well.

It’s what we do once we’ve completed the tasks in the top left quadrant, that separates successful people from those that just can’t seem to catch a break, despite them working just as hard.

External pressures push you to complete the rest of your urgent tasks, those in the bottom left quadrant, but inherent in this system of classification, is evidence that you have more important tasks to accomplish. 

Prioritizing important work, that is not urgent, is the secret of successful people.

It’s all very well knowing this, but it can be difficult to put the theory into action. This is because we experience cognitive dissonance when we attempt to prioritize less urgent tasks over those that we are being pressured to complete. 

It takes considerable will power, and I sometimes even resort to mind tricks that force a false sense of urgency to those important tasks that are languishing. A good recent example was when I arranged to show a preview of an upcoming conference talk to an informal group, a few weeks before the conference itself.

The informal presentation created a new urgency to do the work, making it easier for my mind to be comfortable with favouring it over less important, but more urgent tasks. 

As for Mr Covey, he proposes that we delegate the work in the bottom left quadrant, and drop the tasks from the not important, not urgent quadrant. Maybe this is wise from a purely academic point of view, but in reality this would mean I don’t get to watch any cat videos.

I say, keep the bottom right quadrant alive, and sprinkle it sparingly throughout your work week for some umami deliciousness.

Photo credit: Gina B&W by Stefan Ledwina.