Being under pressure at work can be stressful. You have too much to do and you
don’t have enough time.
Learning
the difference between urgent and important is vital if you are to become more
productive.
If you are one of the many thousands of us who constantly check your emails,
immediately respond to every query from colleagues, clients and even friends
then you can’t be concentrating on those things that are important. If
something is so urgent, wouldn’t your colleague, client or friend have picked
up the phone?
Right! So,
we now know the emails can wait a while until the important jobs are out of the
way. Some people have been known to put an out of office message saying that ‘I
will next be checking my emails at 4pm this afternoon, if your email is urgent,
please ring me.’ Would that work for you?
Equally,
are you one of the many thousands of us who write a ‘to-do’ list every day and
then pick off the ten easy ones only to wonder what you’ve really achieved –
with the important stuff still outstanding?
The difference between urgent and important.
Urgent tasks:
There is
demand for your immediate attention all the time – daily deadlines, answering
phone calls and important texts, emails from your boss, emails from your best
clients, social media messages needing a reply. All of these feel important but
often some are not.
We are drawn to these tasks because they make us feel wanted and important;
people want a reply from us but do they need that reply right now?.
Important tasks:
These can
be less dramatic with no alarms or drama like urgent tasks. It’s easy to ignore
them. But rather than someone else’s goals, important tasks contribute to your
long-term goals whether these are professional or personal and could include hitting
those sales figures, completing that project, getting more financially secure,
and advancing your career.
If that seems like an easy distinction we’re often quick to confuse the two. If
you are checking your email so often but it’s preventing you from getting in
the actual work done you mistaking urgency for importance.
What you can do.
Have a look at your to do list each day and grade each task with a ‘u’ or an
‘i’ according to their importance or urgency. Work on the important tasks first
and the urgent stuff will get done because it has to be done. If something
urgent tries to get your attention ignore it until your important work is done
for the day.
As US
President Dwight Eisenhower once said – “I
have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. What is important is
seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Remember, Mayfair cares