Prioritizing What Matters Most: Urgent is Easy, Important is Hard

I realized I was failing because I was succeeding at the wrong things.

At some point in our careers, we’ve all felt the pressure of constant deadlines, last-minute requests, and endless firefighting.?

What if I told you that many of these urgent tasks are distracting you from the important work that drives long-term success? It's time to stop letting urgency hijack your productivity and start focusing on the important things that matter.

Urgent and Important are not the same

Let’s define these first.

• Urgent: Tasks that require immediate attention, often driven by deadlines or consequences e.g., meeting a deadline, firefighting, last-minute requests, etc.
• Important: Tasks that drive long-term value and align with your organization and personal goals e.g., strategic planning, building culture and values, talent development, goal setting, etc.

Urgent tasks can be important, but not all urgent tasks are important, and not all important tasks are urgent.

What is important and/or urgent for you, might not be urgent or important for your team. It is your responsibility to balance your focus on the urgent vs. important and not inherit your team’s definition.?

The day I learned to distinguish between urgent and important was when my career transformation began.

Now that you understand the difference, how might you unlock this superpower? Following is my playbook:

1. Audit your time: Track your time and identify where you can shift your focus.
2. Categorize to prioritize: Categorize your tasks and prioritize effectively.
3. Understand the gap: Determine how you bridge the gap to get to where you need to
4. Communicate: Share your approach with your team and leaders and get buy-in.

Audit your Time

Here's a quick exercise I want you to try:

1. Look at your calendar for the past week
2. Mark each item as either 'urgent', 'important', or ‘both’. Color code all categories - urgent as red, important as green, and both as yellow.
3. Calculate the percentage of time spent on each category.

Step away from your screen and see how much your calendar looks red. I was shocked when I first did this. At GoDaddy, I realized I spent over 70% of my time on urgent but low-impact tasks. That's when I knew something had to change.

Categorize to Prioritize

The Eisenhower Matrix is a game-changer. This simple tool helps you understand where you should spend time vs where you currently spend time.

1. Urgent and Important: Do it now
2. Important, not Urgent: Schedule it
3. Urgent, not Important: Delegate it
4. Not Urgent and Not Important: Get out of it

Understand the gap

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What did you not do last week that you should have?
• Why have you been unable to delegate “not important” tasks?
• Does your urgency align with the expectations of your stakeholders?
• Do you find yourself thrashing across tasks?

Try the following ideas:

1. Schedule 'Important' Time: Block out time in your calendar for important, non-urgent tasks. Religiously protect this time and add an agenda to these blocks on your calendar throughout the week
2. Batch Similar Tasks: Group similar urgent tasks together to handle them more efficiently.?
3. Create Systems: Develop processes to handle recurring urgent tasks more effectively.
4. No Meeting Day: At Meta, I implemented a 'No Meeting Wednesday' policy for my team. It allowed me to stop, think, write, and discuss meaningful topics without worrying about what was next on my calendar.

Communicate

Every Monday, I would publicly publish a list of my priorities for the upcoming week and tag folks I would be leaning on to help in areas I could not give my attention to. What did this do?

1. Focus on outcomes, not outputs: I started measuring weekly success through outcomes I achieved vs the number of things I got done.
2. Saying “No” more: I learned to say no effectively through a framework called TRAP. Read more here .
3. Default Delegation: My team learned that I would ask for volunteers who wanted to take stuff off my plate to empower them and help them expand the box they operate in. Over time, instead of finding volunteers, I had folks reach out actively to take on new tasks.

Being busy is not the same as being effective.?

TL;DR

Prioritizing important work transforms the outcomes you generate one ripple at a time. Team morale improves as team members see themself taking on a bigger role and feel more valued and motivated, leading to stronger outcomes and lower churn. By not getting bogged down on every new email, message, or notification, I reserved time for creative thinking and innovation. By communicating this consistently every week, my teams adopted my approach leading to better outcomes for the team and the business.

Auditing your time to understand urgent vs important is not just a one-and-done exercise - it is a muscle you need to exercise and build one week at a time. Not only will your productivity improve, you will see a meaningful change in the scale of the outcomes your team delivers.

So, what are you waiting for? Start focusing on the important today …

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