A Post a Day in May #6: Urgent or important?

I have pledged to write a new post for this blog every day in May. 

In the early days of our collective lockdown, much was written about how we should be maximizing our time and doing all those things that, previously, we didn't have time for. Now, many weeks later, much is being written about how that was bunk and we should just chill and live our life. 

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

It got me thinking about Brené Brown and her advice to distinguish between what is important and what is urgent. And that took me on a Google search, which landed me on Dwight Eisenhower, who, I learned, was quoting an academic from Princeton during a speech at the UN, when he said, "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." This became The Eisenhower Principle and is represented by a matrix — and, of course, these days, there's an app to help you with it, but old-fashioned paper and pencil will work just fine. 

Take a blank page and draw one line up/down and another line across to create four quadrants. Then label them like this: 

• Top left = DO FIRST: important + urgent
• Top right = SCHEDULE: important but not urgent 
• Bottom left = DELEGATE: not important but urgent 
• Bottom right one = DON'T DO: not important + not urgent 

But that's the easy part. The more difficult task is to figure out which tasks and responsibilities in our life fit into which quadrant. This will, of course, vary by person, circumstance and context. And while I'm not sure making these distinctions is ever all that easy — regardless of all else — I think it's much more difficult during the extraordinary context in which we find ourselves these days: 

• We know what we're in: Lock-down 
• We don't really understand how we got here. (Do we? How did the coronavirus start, anyway?)
• And we surely don't know when we're getting out: That second wave will come, I am sure of it -- but when? And who will be caught in it? Where? For how long? 

When so much is so unknown, I find it helpful to have a pattern with which to help me organize my tasks, thoughts and priorities. I think I'll try Eisenhower's principle and decision-making matrix to keep my focus on what, to me, is important and what, to me, is urgent — and to neither conflate nor confuse the two. 

Image source: Wikimedia

For example: For me, on any given day, it might be both important and urgent to write a blog post, while it's important but not urgent to complete a collage-in-progress. Letting in the cat, who is scratching at the door, would be considered urgent but not important because that task is delegated to Val during the workday. Watching another episode of The Great British Baking Show could, possibly, be considered neither urgent nor important; yet, I would choose to do it anyway. Such is the complex nature of choice I am faced with these days. 

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