Important vs. Urgent
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President
“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” — Lao Tzu


It’s human nature: most people spend way too much time on urgent and unimportant things. I am convinced that if you want to achieve your goals, be faster, or be above average, you have to be disciplined with your time and actively fight against your own human nature. A mentor sketched out a simple framework for me that has helped me immensely and here’s how it works.
On the X Axis you have urgency as a scale from high to low. On the Y Axis you have importance as a scale from low to high. The resulting matrix provides 4 quadrants which are ‘buckets’ that every action you take falls into.

From a conceptual point of view: you want to spend 80% of your time in quadrants 1 and 2 while avoiding quadrants 3 and 4. This may sound doable but turns out to be very challenging when the rubber meets the road — you’ll have to fight to prioritize quadrants 1 and 2.
To bring this to life, let’s do a real life exercise.
Take a sheet of paper and write down a list of 10 things you did today at work (replied to your boss’s email, prepared the end of quarter deck, attended your team meeting, etc.)
Flip the piece of paper over and draw this diagram:

Now take each of the 10 activities you wrote down and plot them in this matrix. Where did you spend most of your time? What is your top priority right now at work — did it make it on the diagram?
Whenever I do this exercise, I am convicted that I’m not spending enough time on important and not urgent priorities. I’m also struck by how hard it is to spend my time in that quadrant and have found a few insights to help myself spend more time there.
- Identify a priority you have that is important but not very urgent and that you know you aren’t spending enough time on. For this example we’ll use ‘Hiring a great team’. We’ll assume that hiring take a lot of time — writing job descriptions, interviewing, and evaluating candidates, and that the process is primarily driven by how much energy you exert on it.
- Before you start working on Monday, open your calendar
- Determine a number of hours that you’d be proud to spend on this priority. Let’s say 25. If that sounds like a lot, it should because it’s a priority.
- Go into your calendar and schedule all 25 hours in at least 2 hour blocks

Here comes the hard part…
5. When these times arrive during your day, ONLY work on hiring a great time. A few tips that may be helpful as you do this:
- Be honest with yourself — there is no one who knows if you’re actually doing this besides yourself
- Close out of your email
- Turn your phone on silent and put it out of sight
- Close out of Slack, Skype, and any instant communication tool
You may be thinking: “Wait a second, I need to send emails and chat with my colleagues in order to hire a great team”. Fair enough. But if you leave all of these things open, I think you will fail. So, open up a google document and write the 3 emails you need to send. Then, when the block comes to an end, open up your email and send the emails all at once.
In general there are two ways to tackle this challenge which are equally effective: prioritize the important things and SHUT DOWN the unimportant things. You can tackle the problem from both ends of the spectrum and end up winning. If you have additional ideas on strategies to spend your time in the right quadrants, please leave a comment below!
If you are excited to start spending your time on important things and shut down unimportant tasks, here a few words of encouragement and good luck!
- Trust me: when you stop doing urgent things, nobody dies.
This is a true story: person A and person B in a SaaS company. Person A is on top of their email, they are a Zero-inbox champion — good luck responding to an email before they do-they even have a loud chime that reverberates their computer every time an email comes in.
Person B is not on top of their email. They time box the amount of time they allow themselves to read and reply to emails, quickly scanning their inbox at the end of the day and responding to urgent emails. Are there some people who may wish that person B replied more quickly on emails? Sure. Here is person B’s inbox:

Within one year, person A was demoted, isolated to an individual contributing role and removed from all management responsibilities. Person B got so much stuff done, the company doubled their salary from $80,000 to $150,000. I know there are more factors in this story but the point remains.
2. This idea applies to both work and personal life. How much time are you spending with your kids and wife? How can you help yourself spend your time where you want to?
