Wisdom is Choosing the Important Over the Urgent

There are people who have a tendency of marking all their emails as ‘urgent’. Others when giving assignments, make sure it comes with those colorful stickers labelled ‘URGENT’ supposedly, to wheedle you to put aside everything else and gladly focus on it because it is burning! These are the ones I ignore!

Some go ahead to drop big names either the President, some Cabinet Secretary, the Chairman, the CEO or some DFI. Naturally when such big names are dropped and the task is marked as ‘urgent’, the default reaction would be to put everything aside and focus on the urgent matter.

Confidential and Top Secret

Others would even call it confidential, classified or top secret as they do with matters of deep state. This is to make you feel privileged and want to prioritize the work thinking that by doing it quickly, you will be saving the country. A hero!

For those of you who are devoted Catholics, you may have figured it by now that this piece was inspired by last Sunday’s scriptures. I listened intently as the Priest preached about something I have believe and practiced over the years.

From my experience, I have come to appreciate that no task can be both urgent and important at the same time. However, the ‘urgent’ may seem so because the things we categories as urgent have a way of blurring our decision-making to the point that we elevate them to the ‘important’ status.

Yet, each time you fall for it and become a victim of doing that which is urgent, most of the time you will realize that you will be doing things that only benefit everybody else other than yourself. Any activity given to you as urgent will most likely benefit the one giving it to you if you deliver it as expected.

Learn to Say NO!

On the other hand, should you fail to deliver, again you will be the one at a loss because by accepting to do the task, you said yes to something and in the process took over the responsibility of doing it including the accountability bit. When asked, the other person will simply say: “I gave it to Maggie, but she failed to deliver as she always does.”

In a way, Maggie should be blamed because she took in more than she could chew and seemingly, this is something she does quite often otherwise why would one say “this is something she does all the time?”

So next time you are given an assignment and you know too well you will not be able to deliver on time, no matter how ‘urgent’ the assignment is, please, be brave and wise enough to politely say ‘No’.

Of course, I am not blinded to the fact that some lazy people tend to say ‘no’ to everything yet have nothing on their plate at that time. These are not the individuals I am targeting with this piece. Frankly speaking, if you know you fall in this category, please stop reading now and move on to what you do best - nothing!

While others may brand you names such as ‘difficult to work with’, it should not worry you provided you know what you are doing is right. Remember, it is better for you to have few tasks that you deliver effectively and on time, than to have your in-tray overflowing with paperwork yet with a clean out ray - nothing coming out!

Urgent is a Liability

I know even at this point some of you are still struggling to tell the difference between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’. Worry not, I am here for you, as always, and I will attempt to simplify these two management concepts for you.

Look at it this way: ‘Important’ is a long-term asset with a high and sure return on investment whereas, ‘urgent’ is a short-term liability with long-term implications.

Why do I call ‘urgent’ a liability? Well the answer is simple, and I have even alluded to it in my explanations above.

It is a liability because it takes away your valuable time at the expense of doing that which is ‘important’ and makes you put resources to achieve somebody else’s goals which in the end, you have nothing to gain from its success but everything to lose should things go wrong.

Take a loan for instance. Most of the time, we commit ourselves to a credit facility because of an urgent, pressing matter. Because of the emergency, you may find yourself taking a loan of three million shillings. You then lie to yourself that you will attend to the urgent matter and then invest the balance.

Invest? From the three million, the bank will retain 200K as processing fees or some other fancy name they call it, but you will not care because it is nothing compared to 3M. Then 1M goes to offsetting a previous loan, another 1M attends to the emergency and before you know it, you find yourself being very prominent in useless fundraisers, supporting urgent matters of friends and relatives.

Fast-forward five years on, you end up paying the lender up to five million shillings… long after the urgent matter had become history, alongside your investment dreams. This is a typical scenario with all urgent loans, you will have to be a Jimnah Mbaru type of genius to turn the balance of the loan to 5M!

Focus on the Important

‘Important’ on the other hand are the things that you determine early enough as those you must achieve to meet your current and future needs. These are the things that you dedicate your time and resources doing and have a sure and predetermined return in future.

When you spend your time doing the things that are important, in time you will realize that you have less and less urgent things to do. Usually, the urgent things arise when you ignore the important tasks over time.

Employees for instance have annual plans with specific targets to achieve either weekly, monthly, or quarterly. However, many tend to procrastinate the small activities until the last minute at which point the small tasks become big and suddenly urgent.

Family is Important

As I conclude, I wish to focus on the family, something most of us do not consider as urgent but is nonetheless important. This is a discussion that will always come up when talking about 'work-life' balance which in a way is the same as 'Urgent-Important' balance.

Family they say is like a glass of water, when it drops it breaks and irrevocably spills the content; career on the other hand is like a ball, when it drops it bounces back and sometimes rises even higher depending on the velocity of the drop!

When holding both the ball and glass in either hand, the ball is urgent, but the glass is important, there now is your choice my friend!

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