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.

Short term versus long term

The question has arisen: how to balance short-term and long-term developments in an innovation portfolio?

Like so many of these, I have a problem with the framing of the question itself.

My experience of funnels organised by short- and long-term is that the long-termers never get hatched. There are so many barriers for them on the journey – among these changing priorities, shifting environment, new team members, new bosses. And sheer loss of interest.

For me, it’s more useful to categorise innovation project candidates as either urgent or important. That way they all get appropriate and timely attention and resource.

In Praise of Lists

The Italian writer, Umberto Eco, has curated an exhibition for the Louvre in Paris of lists. Of lists? “The list is the origin of culture,” says Eco, citing Homer, Thomas Mann and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

A personal favourite of mine are the lists in the extraordinary travel books of Patrick Leigh-Fermor. The Argentinean poet and essayist, Jorge Luis Borges, lists his special pleasures as: “Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee and Stevenson’s prose.” In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king lists the names of the French and English dead, ending with plain Davy Gam, Esquire. Early in the Bible we encounter the Ten Commandments, and later the Beatitudes. Buying a CD or book or DVD, we get the help of Google to present us with a list of options.

And lists are at the core of effective work, as we sort out the important and the urgent each day from amongst the dozens of jobs competing for our attention. This is especially important in innovation projects, where things can inadvertently come off the rails at any moment.

But there is always a struggle - every day, every hour - between the important and the urgent, where the latter seems so often to drive out the former.

How do you deal with this problem?