The urgent versus the important

It always amazes me that so many senior executives have so much trouble managing their time. The idea that they might systematically sort their to-do list into four prioritised categories often seems to come to them as a massive new insight.

Just in case this might be useful for you, this is what I teach:

• Urgent and important things: get top priority and most of your time
• Important but non-urgent things: get the rest of your time
• Urgent but unimportant things: are delegated - all of them (or dumped)
• Unimportant, non-urgent things: are dumped immediately

In the case of a group of senior academics at City University London, all of whom felt desperately overstretched, they told me that I just didn’t understand. Of course, that’s true. But they doubtless remain continuously in borderline meltdown.

The urgent drives out the important

A major issue for us all in managing our time is that the urgent always seems to win out over the important.

It’s quite clear that the things in one’s to-do list that are both urgent and important get first call on our time. It’s at the next level down that the problems lie.

What to do about it?

If we have people who report to us, I’ve no doubt that the urgent-but-not-so-important jobs need to be speedily delegated, so that we can focus on the important-but-not-so-urgent stuff.

If we don’t do this, we spend our working lives fire-fighting. A recipe for failure.