We all appreciate that, to stay on top of ever lengthening to-do lists and heaving inboxes, prioritisation is critical.

It’s probably less well-known that distinguishing between what’s urgent and what’s important is equally vital to productivity and efficiency.

To the uninitiated, it may not seem as though there is that much of a difference between the two, but, trust us, there is! Just because something is urgent, that doesn’t necessarily make it important.

Indeed, as America’s thirty fourth President and World War II general Dwight Eisenhower said: “What’s important is seldom urgent” …and vice versa.

Put simply, urgent tasks are those requiring immediate action, or those with the earliest deadlines. However, we all have differing priorities, and someone else’s urgent deadline may not necessarily be an important one for you.

Your important actions and tasks, by contrast, are those which assist you in achieving your own goals or priorities. If you have a five-year-plan, for example, the important tasks are those which you need to complete to get there.

One question to ask yourself when deciding whether a task is important is to ask yourself whether not doing it would actively risk your strategy. If the answer is yes, then that task is extremely important.

Another way of looking at it is to think of it as the difference between being in responsive mode (when you focus on important tasks) and reactive mode (when you focus only on what’s urgent).

This Eisenhower Method for task prioritisations leaves few grey areas, making it ideal for use in emergencies.

So how does it work?

Business thinker Stephen Covey used Eisenhower’s principles in his bestselling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

There are essentially four squares in the matrix, as follows:

In the first quadrant, the Urgent and important tasks need to be tackled most quickly –these are things which cannot be delegated. However, if you spend all your time doing these tasks, you are merely firefighting. You are just reacting to events, without planning or strategising.

In the second quadrant, those jobs which are Important but not urgent again are ones which cannot be delegated, but they tend not to have a specific deadline. In many ways it would be nice to “live” entirely in this box, and spend all our time working on our own priorities, though of course, realistically, that’s not going to happen. Make time to plan these tasks, or they simply will not get done. In this box could go getting enough exercise, or a book you’ve always meant to read.

In the third box are the Urgent but not important tasks. Often, these are distractions and interruptions, or the times when someone wants some help with something that’s not important to you. Where possible, see if you can delegate these things or shift them into the fourth quadrant.

This box for is reserved for jobs that are not urgent or important. These are just time-wasting activities, like watching endless “hilarious” animal videos, aimlessly surfing the web or scrolling through Twitter and Facebook pages. Unless you are unwinding at the end of the day, eliminate these things from your day.

Stephen Covey says the boxes can also be classified in this way:

1. Do it now
2. Decide when to do it
3. Delegate
4. Dump

The ideal is to spend most time in Quadrant 2.

This means work is being planned properly and firefighting kept to a minimum. It also means that when something that’s genuinely urgent comes your way, you will be much better placed to take it on.

Use the urgent/important filter and apply it to as many areas of your life as you can — try it for a week and see the difference it makes. There’s even an iPhone Eisenhower App to help.

In an increasingly frantic world where the “noise” and the constant varied and conflicting demands on our time never stop, distinguishing between what’s urgent and what’s important has never been so crucial.

Implement the 4 quadrants rather than a basic set of ‘priorities’ and see how well you can balance your workload in PocketFM.

Stuart & the PocketFM team

First published on the PocketFM blog