Urgent Matters Are more Important than What’s Important

Written By Milo; Related posts in Time Management

When people are faced with tons of workload, confused, they usually asked themselves what they need to do first; most people struggle to identify and act on what is urgent rather than what is important. Identifying what is urgent against what is important is essential in creating our to-do’s, managing our timeline and becoming a high performer individual. Some of the thoughts we encounter while deciding on our priorities include:

1. Which is which?
2. It seemed important at that time (Seth Godin)
3. I’ll prioritize easy tasks first.
4. I’m so confused, what if I do this first before the other one.
5. etc…

Urgent is defined on the web as “compelling immediate action; too pressing to permit delay;” while important is “great significance or value”. When we priorities tasks we need to identify urgent ones first by asking the following questions:

1. Which among the tasks has a deadline?
2. Which among deadlines is going first?
3. If there is no deadline, which one has the biggest impact when prolonged?
4. Which one has the biggest impact when the task is not meant?

Not all tasks are urgent and sometimes we confuse what is important to what is urgent. Accomplish the urgent ones first while planning for the important ones; but bear in mind that important ones needs to be addressed right after the urgent ones otherwise they become urgent too.

[tags]Time Management[/tags]

Friday, October 6, 2006


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3 Comments »

  1. So much i want to do, but so little time - Personal Development for Smart People Forums said,

    November 5, 2006 @ 12:41 pm

    [...] Everyone struggle with time but one should keep in mind that there is only so much you can do. You need to identify what is urgent as opposed to what is important. I have written about urgent vs important here. It’s a skill and discipline that takes so much to learn and master. ______________ http://miloriano.com [...]

  2. Time management. - Personal Development for Smart People Forums said,

    November 20, 2006 @ 11:17 pm

    [...] I haven’t actually read GTD because I have always been very pleased with my productivity output and I always get things done. I keep things simple and identify which is important vs urgent. The link is a post I wrote a while back about working on urgent matters first. In an excerpt: When people are faced with tons of workload, confused, they usually asked themselves what they need to do first; most people struggle to identify and act on what is urgent rather than what is important. I have read and attended ton loads of time management trainings and while they are good, I’d rather keep my philosophies simple: urgent vs important. Life is too complicated already. This works for me and see if it works for you also. ______________ http://miloriano.com: Young mans journey to become a CEO & succeed [...]

  3. Anon said,

    September 18, 2008 @ 1:15 pm

    Important issue, but I think your analysis is wrong headed.

    You basically treat the problem as being one of ordering when things are going to get done sooner or later, assuming there’s eventually time to do everything. First accept that you will always fail on that count. There are always things that you want to get done, but won’t do. (unless you’re lacking imagination as to what could be done)

    Planning to do the urgent things first is defacto planning that the things that don’t get done shall be the important ones.

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