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For today’s Shawn Today we’re going to talk about distinguish between important and urgent, and doing work that matters.
This question comes from Jason. He says his biggest challenge when it comes to focus is “distinguishing between important vs urgent. We all know the Eisenhower/Covey matrix, but what actually belongs in each quadrant?”
This is a great question. It’s the question of our lives, right? Because if we only focus on the urgent, we might never get to the important.
I think the issue isn’t so much distinguishing between important and urgent. Rather, it’s distinguishing between important and not-important.
We’ll get to this, but in short, urgent things, by nature, will always find us. And so it’s our job to know what is important — what’s worth doing — and what isn’t important.
## Overview of the Urgent/Important matrix
**Quadrant 1: urgent and important**
If your baby is crying, or your daughter falls off her bike, or dinner catches on fire then it’s important for you to tend to it immediately.
Just this morning Tools & Toys was having a database error, and I had to go into the MySQL and repair some tables. That was pretty urgent and important work.
It’s important because neglecting it will have serious ramifications. And it’s urgent because it needs your attention right now and you cannot neglect it or defer it.
**Quadrant 2: important, but not urgent**
These are the things which are important for the same foundational reason as above. Neglecting them will have negative ramifications. But they’re not urgent — you can defer them or put them off without noticing any negative consequences right away.
However, over time, the perpetual neglect of these things will cause you to miss the target.
* Planning
* Resting
* Exercising
* Making meaningful progress toward our goals
* Relationship building
* Writing
* Learning
**Quadrant 3: Urgent, but not important**
Things which are pining for your attention but that aren’t worth your time — at least, not worth your time right now.
* Door-to-door salesmen
* Phone solicitors and sales calls
* Twitter @replies, DMs, Facebook messages, etc.
* Most emails
* Meeting requests with most people
**Quadrant 4: Neither urgent nor important**
Things that are just flat-out busy work or time wasters.
* Checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
* Watching television
* YouTube Fail Compilations
### Defining Urgent
Urgent tasks always know where to find us. That’s the nature of an emergency — it’s loud, noisy, and demands attention. We don’t often need to know the difference between urgent and important because urgent will find us.
What we need to know is the difference between important and not-important.
Non-important things which are urgent, often *feel* important simply because of their urgency.
This is what people are talking about when they quote the poster that says *a lack of planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine*.
One of my biggest pet peeves is door-to-door salesmen. They come to my home, interrupt the time I’m having with my family, and they want to sell me something that I didn’t ask for. I always politely tell them that I’m not interested, and sometimes they’ll politely leave. But sometimes you get the person who just won’t give up, or they take it personally that I don’t want to buy what they’re selling. It’s **important** to them and they’ve made it **urgent** to me, but it’s not important to me. And just because they’re trying to make it so, doesn’t mean I have to let them.
The priority of how I want to spend my time is clear: I know that I would much rather spend my time playing trains with my boys than talking to a stranger about a lawn care service I don’t want.
We need that clear definition for all the areas of our life. We need a plumb line to help us define between important and not-important.
### Defining Not-Important
Things that are not important are things which don’t matter. Or that don’t matter enough.
There are so many things you could be doing, but only a few which have the highest value.
What is the best thing you can do next that will provide value to your work, your audience, your family, or yourself?
### Defining Important
How do you define what the best thing you can do next is? What belongs in the “important” quadrants?
In many ways, it’s different for everyone.
We have to seek out and learn what it is that goes in each quadrant. It involves learning what the most important areas in your life are. It involves learning about what sort of work you’re best at, so that your time is being spent well. And it involves setting long-term and short-term goals that you can make progress toward.
Put another way, there are two metrics to help you define “important”. (If you read last week’s email regarding The Plumb Line, then this will sound familiar.)
There are two ways to make sure the work you’re doing on a consistent basis is of the important kind.
1. **Know your Most Important Tasks**: It’s wise to identify 1–3 tasks that are the most important to get done today. That way, when something urgent or distracting shows up, you’ve got a concrete map for what you need to get done today that will result in making progress on meaningful work.
I also suggest taking the daily “Most Important Tasks” up a level and having a short list of 3 desired outcomes for your week, as well as 3 for the month. That way your 3 daily tasks are the things which are moving you forward toward your weekly goals which are in turn moving you forward toward your monthly goals.
Ben Franklin says that little strokes fell great oaks. Which means the best thing we can do is to make incremental progress on our projects. But there’s nothing worse than finding out we’ve been chopping down the wrong tree. So, setting those weekly and monthly goals helps you make sure your daily progress is moving you in the right direction. But there’s also another metric that sits alongside our Most Important Tasks themselves. And that’s knowing the overarching values for how you want to be spending your time and what you want to be doing.
If your energy were an investment portfolio, are you investing in the right areas?
That’s why the second metric for distinguishing between important and not-important is to Define your Most Important Goals (or Values).
2. Defining your Most important values means having clarity about the things you want to spend your time doing as it relates to work, family, and personal life. These values aren’t so granular that they define what your actual daily actions items are, yet they specific enough that it’s easy to know if you are accomplishing them (or not).
### Doing Work That Matters
I can hear you thinking. That’s great, Shawn, but how do I define my weekly goals? My daily goals? My most important values? It’s all so much!
It is so much. And that’s because most of us grew up in a culture that taught us how to do what we were told and fed us a steady diet of busy work and entertainment.
Most parents don’t teach financial literacy to their kids. And unless you major in economics or accounting, your school won’t teach it to you either. At the age of 65, more than half of Americans have a net worth of 170,000. And that net worth includes the equity of their home and their car. Well, the average home in America is worth 135,000 and the average car is worth $5,000. Which means most people, when they retire, have $30,000 in the bank. That’s it. Nobody told them that if they wanted to retire well, they would need to make some radical lifestyle changes and life differently than all of their peers.
The same goes with our time and energy. We’re not being taught independence, we’re being taught obedience. In the same way we don’t know how to budget, live beneath our means, and use money as a tool. Nor do we know how to use our time as a tool to do work that matters.
That’s why it’s so overwhelming at first when we realize we want to do more meaningful work. When we realize our days are being absorbed by the urgent things and never the important, we don’t know what to do.
If you want to do work that matters, it’s very likely that it will frighten you. Because it will be something that might not work. You don’t know how you’ll get funding for it, or you don’t know if anyone will read it, or you don’t know if anyone will even notice it. It’s probably something that you never got permission to go do, and yet only you can do it.
Important work is not safe. It’s risky. It’s frightening. It might now work.
But that’s the work that matters. That’s the work that will produce something only you can make. Or that’s the work that will lead you failure which will lead you to the next thing that fails and to the next thing that finally does succeed and make a difference.
### Recap
You do work that matters by choosing to face your fears, take risks, and ignore the voices within and without that tell you you’re being too bold.
Then, you spend your time by doing things which fall in line with your life values and which are the most important tasks for making progress on your goals and desired outcomes.
I know it all sounds like so much, and it is. Someone who has never budgeted before is equally overwhelmed at the idea of giving every dollar a job and sacrificing their daily Starbucks so they can pay off their credit cards. But the feeling of being overwhelmed doesn’t mean it’s not worth making the lifestyle change.
So too is it worth it take the steps to re-order how we spend our time an energy.