Around the age of six or eight, we become aware of theconcept of “time” .
We begin to understand seconds, minutes, hours, and our perception of the passage of time.
Soon after, we begin to develop habits and make decisions about how use our time.
In our stages of development, others often dictate how we spend our time. However, as we become professionals, we have more and more autonomy with our time.
We develop our own personal systems for spending our time – sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
And each of us must decide:how I can best use my time effective?
In this decision process, we can be led to think that tasks are important when they are not. Or we put off the most important items on our to-do list because they are usually the most difficult.
And then we confuse what is urgent and what is important.
This is a crucial distinction that can alter ourpriorities and task lists .
Before we go any further, here’s how we’ll define these terms:
Urgent:
Items that require immediate attention.
Important:
Items that affect your long-term goals and strategy
One way to think about what you need to do and what you want to do is to place your tasks in a time management matrix, often known as a Time Management MatrixEisenhower .
Named after the former US president, this method was popularized by Stephen Covey in7 Habits of Highly Effective People .
Here’s what the quadrant looks like with some examples relevant to the work:
| Urgent | Non-urgent | |
| Important | Deadline for sending a deposit for an eventfile to presentationAn embarrassing mistake in your social media feed | Developing a new habitCreating a new strategy |
| Unimportant | “Urgent” meetingsOthers’ demands on your time | Check Obsessively Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or other social mediaChecking your favorite news sites… againBuy online |
Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important
These are the things you should do immediately or soon there will be negative consequences. These can be immediate reviews and changes that you need to make before a deadline, and they can have other time-sensitive implications.
These high-value activities will bring gains to your company that must also be done immediately.
Quadrant 1 Urgent and important examples:
- Deadline for sending a deposit for an event
- file to presentation
- An embarrassing mistake in your social media feed
- Testing capabilities before the day from launch
Unless you’re a trauma surgeon or something heroic, this isn’t where most of your work should be.
Quadrant 2: Not urgent, but important
Here’s the sweet spot for prioritizing your work.
Your most productive work can happen here. That’s what you’re building for. These projects, tasks, and other action items are the building blocks that help you achieve your long-term initiatives.
These are not immediately urgent, but they help you achieve success in your goals.
Sometimes these tasks include putting out fires that may not be your responsibility or should not have happened in the first place.
Quadrant 2 Important/Non-Urgent Examples:
- Developing a new habit
- Creating a new strategy
- Working on your quarterly report (before the end of the quarter)
- Planning the budget
- Writing code for new product feature release
- Creating a Prototype and MVP
This is how most of your daily work *should* be.
If you’re spending too much time in quadrants one and three on emergencies, you need to rethink, reprioritize, or find more resources to help you.
Quadrant 3: Urgent but Unimportant
This is the most dangerous quadrant.
This is where many of us also unwittingly live and breathe.
It’s easy for other people to demand our time without realizing exactly what they’re doing.
Their problem isn’t necessarily your emergency. If they are trying to find a quick solution or answer to something that is not driving the business, clear communication is extremely important.
A productivity platform likeClickUpsolves this.
Users define different priority levels for tasks, providetime estimatesto ensure the person responsible knows the scope, send reminder notifications, and relay any important information to the entire team. This helps keep work and expectations aligned and allows you to be amore effective team .
We have to be careful, though. Our phones and communication tools are designed to distract us every second.Notification overload is a real thing .
Push notifications on our phone for social media apps make us think something is urgent, but it really isn’t – especially when it’s just your friend showing you how much fun they’re having on vacation. Maybe. Urgent? Not a chance.
Interesting?
Perhaps. Urgent? No chance.
Quadrant 4: Unimportant, Not Urgent
Also known as the procrastination quadrant.
This is what you find yourself doing, even if it’s not important and it’s not urgent. Basically, it’s the things you’re doing when you should be working.
That’s not to say you should never take a break, recreation, or relaxation. But sometimes good things can be taken to the maximum. And you don’t want them to become that for you.
They can include things like:
- Check Obsessively Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or other social media
- Checking your favorite news sites… again
- Buy online
There are a lot ofproductivity appson the market today that can help you stay focused. One of my favorites isthe Forest. For every block of time you are productive and not touching your phone, a tree grows.
You can even start building a forest and share your progress with your friends. It’s a game that keeps you off the phone.
Recognizing the difference between urgent and important
Another ding in the email inbox.
More phone calls coming in.
And do you know what that means? It’s decision time.
Yes, each individual email can make or break your next minutes, next hour, entire day, or even entire week.
If you decide to open the email (perhaps wait for a designated time!), you will need to make a decision.
Where does this question/request fall? Does it fit into the Eisenhower Matrix? How urgent and important is the task related?
Social media and the news cycle make us think that every breaking item is urgent and demands our immediate attention.
We have to filter out the noise to find the true signal.
Urgent tasks create a reaction.
We want to work immediately and think of an answer. Yes, some roles require more urgent decision-making than others (hello emergency operators!). But without the right processes, we will become anxious and not process as well as we can.
The rush to get an answer can cause a bad decision that can negatively impact productivity in the future – adding more problems to our workload.
Important tasks give us time to strategize.These projects and tasks are what we want to get done and hope to contribute. These are tasks for specifying new products, offering a new business plan, or thinking about financial goals for the sales team in the next quarter.
Important tasks are intentional action items that need attention. With this additional attention, we expect the number oferrorsto be limited.
It is possible for tasks to be urgent and important when an important decision must be made immediately. But not every urgent task is necessarily important.
The seller’s latest email desperately wants your attention. They’re making it seem urgent, but it’s not important to you. This is a task to delegate.
Other tasks become urgent. Like a coworker complaining about how they need help immediately. Maybe they can figure it out for themselves. Maybe their urgent/important task isn’t your emergency.
The problem with assuming that every task is urgent and important is that you won’t have enough time to think things through strategically.
It’s important that you develop a sales strategy. There might even be a bit of urgency behind it. But if you take a few days or weeks to carefully outline the plan, you’ll have fewer errors on the backend. All important tasks cannot be done immediately – they are too important for that and require extra attention.
But being urgent makes us feel important. Occupation can mask a lack of strategic attention. Major organizational problems can go unnoticed because of busyness.
You may be missing untapped potential opportunities because you haven’t had time to think about important strategic changes.
Think of a company like Blockbuster or Borders.
They were large rental firms of films and book sales. They missed the changing tides.
Could this only be attributed to them missing important tasks?
Of course not. But you can see why time spent on strategic work isn’t always the most “urgent.”
What tasks go in each quadrant?
How do you decide what goes where?
This is very straightforward and goes well in conjunction with the quadrants. They will help:
- Decide whether it is urgent, important or both
- Analyze the value: What is the value of this task to your management, organization and business? What would change and improve if you completed it or moved forward?
- Consider time: How long will it take you to do this? Is it a few minutes or several weeks? Several months? If you create a project plan to handle large-scale initiatives, you’ll complete small tasks with an eye on the big picture.
- Think about cutting: Which items on your list or project seem irrelevant? What is not essential? If tasks or jobs can be combined, combine them.
- Think about delegating: Is there a task that has been assigned to you but is actually the responsibility of another team member? Or is there a more qualified or capable colleague to take over? Understanding your limits and what can be done in practice is also part of the prioritization process.
How can you prioritize your time in the Eisenhower / time management matrix?
Not every task has the same weight. And a task that you consider urgent/important may be considered important/non-urgent by someone else.
However, you should plan time specifically for these different types of tasks. With planning done and scheduled, you can bring the right energy and mindset to each person.
Instead of just doing what’s next on your to-do list, set aside time every day or week for the urgent/important and then the important/non-urgent.
This requires discipline. For example, your mornings may be filled with front-line, urgent, and important tasks. Then you can spend a few minutes delegating other urgent/unimportant tasks.
In the afternoon or later at night, when everything is sorted, you can dive into the more strategic work – the important but not urgent.
That leaves the non-urgent/unimportant tasks. This runs the gamut, from checking your social media to next year’s vacation plans. Eventually, they may even gain a foothold on your urgent or important tasks.
Another important consideration: can you do it in 2 minutes or less?
This rule comes from theGet Things Done methodologyby David Allen.
He says if you can do the task in less than two minutes, you can do it yourself. If not, delegate or review later.
How ClickUp can help you prioritize your work
ClickUp is a productivity platform that can change radically change the way you approach your work.
You can organize your projects with folders and lists and then assign them to your team to work on or assign them to yourself. These features will help you determine the difference between urgent and important not just for you, but for your entire team.
- Goals: Set goals in ClickUp every day, week, month, quarter – whatever you choose. Attach Key Results to each goal (which usually includes a number!) and then link tasks to those targets as well. You can take your urgent/important or important/non-urgent tasks and define what you want to work on each week.
- Priority flags: Mark the tasks your team creates with an urgency level, such as high, important, normal, or low. Once your team reviews or sees a task with a priority flag, they’ll know what to work on next. This works well for tasks that can be due the same day.
- Deadlines/subtasks: Deadlines and subtasks help you break down your work even further. You may have several tasks that need to be done at the same time, or perhaps one task builds on another. Setting due dates for important/non-urgent work ensures you have time for it. Set a specific time of day for a task to be due, if necessary.Subtasks also help you delegate work, especially if a task is extremely urgent or needs to be broken down into multiple parts.
- Assigned comments: This unique ClickUp feature puts comments at the top of the workflow. You can assign ideas that appear in comments to someone else on your team. It then appears in your notifications and box view, prompting the person to take action.
- Multiple Views:ClickUp gives you the option to sort your work with Required Views (like a list or board), but also with a calendar and Gantt chart. We also provide lots of filters to configure how you want your tasks to appear. Sort by due date, status, assignee, and more. ClickUp offers it all.
Bottom line: The difference between urgent and important affects your time
Thinking about the difference between urgent and important can have a pervasive effect on what you accomplish with your time. These general time management strategies can give you more focus.
- Be clear about your long-term priorities
- Understand the difference between productive and unproductive.
- Delegate more efficiently
- Set limits
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