Do you ever feel like the woman in the picture?
Don’t we all sometimes. I had committed to blogging 5 days a week for 2 months to fill this space up with helpful information. With travel, family commitments, visits to friends and some lesson prep, that all fell apart within 2 weeks. The tyranny of the urgent got me.
But we don’t have to be slaves of the urgent, even if you, like me have adult ADHD. (For those who are doubters, it’s a real thing… but more on that later.)
Steven Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, writes about ordering you day (and your life). He makes a distinction between the urgent and the important, and he makes it into a matrix. (If you don’t know what a matrix is, don’t worry; it just works out to 4 different categories:
- The Urgent-Important which Covey calls “Crises.” These don’t come frequently, but they absolutely have to be addressed. I would call these “dumpster fires.” Drop everything and get it done!
- Then there are the urgent but unimportant which Covey calls “Interruptions.” I don’t know about you, but my brain needs these sometimes to just break up my time with a chat, a cup of coffee, a washroom visit, etc.
- Unimportant-nonurgent tasks would be distractions. Online shopping or video watching, things which can pull you in and get you totally off-task for no reason, or even get you disciplined at work.
- The most central tasks are those that are important but not urgent. These are tasks related to your longterm goals and planning. Not urgent because these are LONG term tasks. Being long term, though means they help frame the BIG picture. These are the activities that will ultimately make the most difference in your life.
We can all fall into the trap of spending time on Crises, interruptions and Distractions, while neglecting the central tasks of planning, setting goals and investing time and energy into those goals. If we are to achieve our goal of building great teams to do great works, we will have to structure our days weeks and months around planning first, and then investing time, energy and thought toward the goals that will get us there. Like anything worthwhile, this will not be easy. It will, in fact be painful.
You and I will have to evaluate whether the eventual payoff is worth the cost of saying no to interruptions and distractions while bumping up planning and focusing on our long term goals. How do we do this? Patience, tenacity and flexibility. We have to live like desert chollas in order to leave our mark on the world.