Definition of Urgent in Software Development
ATTENTION!!! You should read this article, it is important but not urgent.
Important is the most common word you can hear from the project managers during the planning stage. While urgent is the popular word used at development. For example, a feature can be important and a broken button can be an urgent issue but if you hear urgent too much, that means there is a problem with your team’s processes. After I notice there were too many urgent requests, I decided to research this topic and that’s how I come to know about the Eisenhower matrix. In this post, I will explain the topics below which will be further investigated in the matrix.
- What is urgent?
- How do you define important?
- What is The Eisenhower Matrix?
Let’s start with what the Cambridge Dictionary says as definitions of important and urgent:
important: “necessary or of great value”
urgent: “ very important and needing attention immediately
Eisenhower Matrix
Eisenhower Matrix is a good tool for teams who want to elevate productivity, have a clear focus, and correct prioritization on tasks on the basis of importance and urgency. It has 4 divisions as important, urgent, not important, and not urgent.
- Important and urgent: Do it right now!
- Important but not urgent: Schedule it to do later.
- Not important but urgent: Delegate these tasks
- Not important and not urgent: Skip tasks for now
Urgent means that you must take immediate action. These tasks need quick reactions, fast and short-term solutions in a hurry.
Important calls for tasks that need long-term solutions and it is crucial for your product. It doesn’t mean you have a long time to fix the issue as delaying it can cause a bigger problem.
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you work in a large team or on a big project, one of the challenges you face is prioritizing the tasks and it is really “important” here to define which tasks are important or urgent.
Divisions of the Matrix
Crisis: Houston! We have a problem here and it is important. You will come across situations that are Life or Death and they will very rarely happen but once these are faced, immediate action is required. It can be an out of cash issue for coming payments or hotfix to an error on the homepage that may disable your customers to use your website.
Plans: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans. This is the most utilized division for Software Development. All your scheduled tasks should be under planning such as future development or refactoring.
Teams should invest more time in this division to prevent crisis moments and interruptions. Tasks in Plans will directly contribute to your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). For instance, in order to have a fast API response, you should plan beforehand. Education and training should also be in this chapter both in daily and work lives.
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Interruptions: Cases that fall under this cluster keep you busy but add no value to your life or project. So, you need to create some time for it or you need to delegate these tasks to somebody else. No, it is not important to read all your mails but you need to check them eventually in order to not miss any mail which needs a reply. Meetings are occasions where teams have the chance to discuss matters. Some of the issues mentioned may be of no importance to you but can be critical for others. A scheduled meeting, therefore, can be urgent to participate as a considerable amount of time is devoted by the team but may not be important always.
Distractions: This part includes all distractions you face in daily life which can be eliminated easily or you can do them in your leisure time. Checking social media, reading junk emails, or casual phone calls are a few examples. It is recommended to reduce or avoid the time you spend on these actions.
To Sum Up…
This blog post originated from a furious (😇) moment at work with too many so-called urgent tasks. Feeling over-stressed, it pushed me to go on a journey to understand how to prioritize tasks and define urgency. Once I googled the “definition of urgent” and saw the vast information about the topic, I decided to write a post about it.
Here I created a list for Dos and Don’ts to summarize the learnings.
✅ Do’s
- Do prioritize your tasks by clearly defining urgent and important.
- Do clarify why tasks are urgent with correct stakeholders.
- Do inform your teammates about tasks’ urgency or importance.
❌ Don’ts
- Don’t act urgently and define the importance of the task when you are not sure. If necessary, check with relevant stakeholders.
- Don’t behave like a task is urgent when it is not to get a quick solution.
- Don’t forget that the unnecessary pressure for non-urgent matters may cause your teammate to become unhappy.
References
You can find more information about Dwight Eisenhower here: — — https://medium.com/@KJ.Jones/the-eisenhower-matrix-for-software-developers-f6de69b7c57a
https://www.groupmap.com/map-templates/urgent-important-matrix
