You let deadlines and routines seduce you into spending time on the urgent at the expense of what's really important.
Do you know your health is important but struggle to prioritize it… until it becomes urgent? Despite your desires and best intentions, do you keep getting pulled into caring for others, old routines, cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, volunteering, scrolling social media, you name it. Are you doing everything except taking care of yourself?
Creating meaningful change requires balancing efficiency and effectiveness. It's not enough to be busy or productive. You have to be productive, specifically with actions that lead to your desired outcome. If I'm not intentional with my time, I can easily fill my days reactively replying to emails, answering questions, and tackling to-do's based on deadlines. Tasks like these may be urgent, but they're not always important.
This tendency to prioritize what's urgent over what's important isn't new. In fact, there's a name for it! It's called the "mere urgency effect." As humans, we are more likely to give our time and attention to tasks with a deadline over those without a deadline, even when tasks without a deadline have a far better payoff.
Even former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke about this tug of war throughout his time as president in the 50's. Known for his ability to manage priorities well, Eisenhower developed the approach behind what would later be called the Eisenhower Matrix.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool that divides tasks into four quadrants:
I. Important and urgent: Tasks that require immediate attention and are critical to achieving your goals
II. Important but not urgent: Tasks are significant for long-term success and personal growth. They don't require immediate action but are essential for achieving goals and improving quality of life
III. Not important but urgent: Tasks that demand immediate action but do not contribute significantly to your long-term goals. These are often distractions or interruptions from others
IV. Not important and not urgent: These tasks are neither pressing nor crucial. They often provide little value and can waste time
According to this matrix, everything you do will fall into one of these four quadrants. Ideally, we'd direct most of our time and attention to working on "important but not urgent tasks," as these tasks support long-term goals.
Urgent items are bound to come up, but if you only tend to what is urgent, you will likely neglect what's important. This is precisely what so many women do with their health. We let deadlines and routines seduce us into spending time on the urgent at the expense of what's really important.
I'm not here to teach you a time management lesson, but I want to remind you, as Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, wrote, "If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will." Either you take control of your calendar and priorities, or someone/something else will demand your time and be your priority.
It is crucial that we wake up each day with clarity about what's truly important in life and act accordingly because how we spend our days becomes how we spend our weeks, and how we spend our weeks quickly becomes, in my case, how we spend our summer…. And eventually our lives.
If you feel like you're always busy yet somehow not getting much done and perpetually pushing back important tasks, I want to leave you with this question: where in your day (or week) are you devoting time to what's important? If you come up blank, it's time to schedule it.
I'd love for you to comment below and tell me how you tackle what's most important to you this week!
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