Urgent or Important?
Seth Godin on Managing Urgencies. He talks about how we can spend so much time putting out fires that we don’t get to our goals. His advice?
I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.
This is what I’m trying to figure out right now. It is still too easy to get stuck in everyday paperwork and interruptions (the line at the door is my biggest frustration). Figuring this out is the only way to accomplish great things. Many people can put out the fires. Being great entails preventing the fires.
Michael Dolan offers the Horizons of Focus to help us achieve our get there.
One of the biggest rewards for the time that you invest in the Important but Not Urgent category (What Stephen Covey calls Quadrant II activities), is that it leads to less of the Fire Fighting (Quadrant I) activites. At least for me committing and prioritizing the important (but not urgent) stuff has been the only way that I was able to escape the “Always Urgent”/ Putting out Fires cycle.