Important and Urgent
Had a good conversation with my management team about our team’s focus and balance of time on things that are important (but not super urgent) vs those things that are important and urgent. Turns out we are spending a lot of time on the later.
The problem with focusing too much time on important and urgent priorities, is that you never really have a chance to think about long-term vision, direction and possibilities. If it is urgent, you’re probably looking for a good-enough answer in a short period of time. It’s hard to make a big breakthrough when you are so hyper-focused in this way.
I’ve made the same mistake in setting priorities in my personal life. Putting things off to free up time for the urgent things. I’ve stopped doing that and have felt a much greater sense of control and achievement. For example, I had to make it to my 5:30pm yoga class today. At 5pm on the nose, after over an hour of discussion, the meeting I was in was running long. Normally, I would just skip the yoga class and stay in the meeting.
Not this time….I just got up and left. The discussion wasn’t super urgent or even important. Yoga wasn’t urgent either, but it was definitely important. My absence was noticed from the meeting, but hey, I if you don’t draw the line somewhere it will draw itself for you!
