Don’t Flood Your Life With Urgent Tasks — Do This Instead
Why you should prioritise important tasks over urgent ones.
How often have you had little time to finish an important project? Whether it’s a deadline for work, an assignment or a personal goal, we are all victims of bad time management at some stage.
Some days we feel we have an abundance of time. But it’s not long until that time diminishes and we find ourselves carelessly rushing towards the end of a project.
Likewise, we all have those small but important tasks we keep telling ourselves to do but are consistently postponed.
These painful scenarios are a common trait of task handling that are challenging to overcome. But fear not, as we’ll be exploring some of the most efficient ways to prioritise your tasks so you can harness your time towards those things that truly matter.
Your Tasks, Measured
Urgency and importance are two vital factors that can be used for measuring tasks. Finding the balance between completing urgent and important tasks can be tricky but there exists a great system for optimising this balance: the Eisenhower Matrix.
Initially developed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Matrix aims to categorise tasks into a 2x2 grid:
The bottom axis represents urgency, the side axis represents importance.
Tasks that are both important and urgent should be given the highest priority. In a studying context, this may be revising for a large exam in two days.
The issue arises when considering the green and blue boxes; more specifically, over-emphasising green box tasks over blue box tasks.
An Important Mistake
Keeping the same context as above, let’s consider the following scenario: it is Friday and you have a large assignment due in a week’s time. There is also a small, unassessed homework task due over the weekend.
An urgent but not important task would be the homework task as it’s due very shortly but doesn’t hold the same value as the larger assignment. The not urgent but important task would be the larger assignment.
In our brains, it seems sensible to complete urgent tasks first, so cracking on with the homework task over the weekend seems a good bet.
But consider come Monday and you’re given another small homework due Wednesday. Now, if you prioritise this over the large assignment you’ll come to realise the inadequate time left for the important assignment. What’s worse is that this task now becomes urgent too.
This is a classic example of failing to work on important tasks.
This is not to say disregard green box tasks altogether — rather, not spending too much time on them leaving no room for what is truly important.
False Urgency
Green box tasks crop up frequently throughout our daily lives: buying new dishwasher tablets, planning journeys and getting food shopping are all things that are not necessarily important but require urgent assistance.
However, one can easily become needlessly obsessive with such tasks, especially when critical tasks are on the horizon.
In a state of overthinking or quick panic, you may think to yourself ‘What on earth am I going to eat tonight?’ and spend the next hour food shopping instead of working on a large deadline for tomorrow. Little to your awareness upon arriving home you realise the array of food options you forgot about sitting in the cupboard.
Smaller issues can be dealt with later, and even when it feels completely necessary to sort them out, it is sometimes useful to recognise this can be stress wearing a mask.
Solutions to non-urgent problems can arise at a later stage — ones that we never initially thought of. This can make handling the task more efficient or eliminate the task altogether. It is for this reason that we should ultimately prioritise important tasks over urgent ones. Nobody cares how efficiently you stack the dishes — what does matter is the detail you invest in your most ambitious projects.
This is the reason for the ‘delegate’ label on the matrix. And if delegating the task is not possible, spending little time or leaving these tasks to the last minute is often the most sensible thing to do.
An Incomplete Ending
Urgent tasks also play a damaging role when it comes to your goals, ambitions and personal life.
How many plans for future ideas and projects have you never got around to? Perhaps it’s a simple task like tidying up your 1001 Spotify playlists. Or maybe it’s something more intentional — say, a project idea you’d love to try out but has been left for months on a lonely post-it note at the bottom of your drawer.
Many of us miss out on opportunities to fabricate wonderful ideas by being stuck in a whirlpool of urgency.
We’ll complete a set of urgent tasks only to discover some more requiring attention. We’ll easily let tasks that crop up throughout the day distract us from our schedule. This is where the precious time needed for important tasks begins to vanish.
Stuck In Urgency
This irrelevant undertaking of tasks can not only block opportunities to try out something new; it can also stagnate progress in our current hobbies and ambitions.
To demonstrate, think of a side hobby that you’re particularly fond of.
Now picture yourself with a good 70 minutes of free time on your hands to spend on your hobby. But before you know it, an email pops up about updating your account information for a particular website. As you exit this email, you are reminded about changing the time for a concert you’re seeing next week — and to let your friend know about the change of time.
The thought of delaying this task is unsettling for your brain. You think to yourself: ‘If I don’t get it done now, it’ll loom over me’, so you sensibly get it done now.
After waiting for your friend to reply and eventually finding a suitable time to squeeze in, the 70 minutes is soon cut in half.
Just Getting It Done
Many of us are tricked by imposing false immediacy on smaller tasks that can be well dealt with later. But the good news is, there is a solution.
Time blocking, or allocating time to stubbornly focus on just one task is crucial for making progress in your deepest intentions. Stopping flickering thoughts of future to-dos is key. There is a strong notion of just getting things done here, no matter what the circumstance.
Apps like HelpMeFocus are very helpful in this regard, which compile all of your mobile notifications for you to bulk-process at a later stage.
Another tip if you’re on a PC: stop yourself opening new tabs unless it’s fully relevant to what you’re currently doing.
It’s no surprise that digital devices are the culprit here — the devices designed to make our lives more efficient. After all, the Internet’s structure is a web: a web of nodes connected by links, which explains why it is so easy to go on tangents whilst browsing online.
Being intentional with your time is also of high value. Writing down what progress you intend to make on a project before starting a session or at the end of a previous session will help keep you on track, away from devilish distractions. This doesn’t have to be too specific nor detailed; just a few bullet points of aims will suffice.
The world we live in today is designed for urgency. But by making your priorities clear and following them through, you’ll be ahead of many. Feed your focus on what truly matters to you and see your ideal life neatly unfold…
