Urgent vs. important

I’ve been thinking a lot about URGENT vs IMPORTANT lately. It seems we let the urgent tasks rule our calendars  instead of giving important issues their due. Why is this?

I think it has to do with taking the path of least resistance. For me, most of the urgent things are easy to take care of even if they are time consuming. All I have to do is react. The important things usually make me think. They are never trivial.

This isn’t to say urgent isn’t also important. Sometimes it is, and requires all-hands-on deck attention. I’ve found that a good test to separate the important from the urgent is to ask, will this decision matter  2-5 years from now? If the answer is yes, then it gets a higher priority.

What do you do to manage urgent vs. important ?

Recently, one of my favorite people on the web is Scott Belsky. He wrote the book Making Ideas Happen and is a co-founder of Behance. What do you think of his approach?

If you can’t see the video, click [here].

Tackling this issue is increasingly more relevant in today’s real-time society. How we manage our time to be most productive is more important and harder than ever before.