Generally speaking, I am pretty good under pressure. This can take the form of final revisions the night before the presentation, or conference calls lined up back-to-back. The endorphin gets going and you can ignore the pain. The dopamine gets going and you feel the achievement. If it’s team-based work, the serotonin gets going and it feels like you are “taking one for the team.” All these happiness chemicals in your body – getting you addicted to a performance high of last-minute work. Yikes, do I really want to live this way? Isn’t it better to do the slow-important, not urgent, things?

Are you good under pressure?

Most consultants and motivated folks reading this blog get a thrill out crushing work – especially at the last minute. We feel busy = we feel important. If I have 10+ things to get done, isn’t it logical that I triage the most urgent and important things first? Sound like I work in the emergency department, right?

Problem #1:

You will make lots of small mistakes. These may be non-fatal, but the last-minute run-up doesn’t give you enough time to proofread. Typos, missing page numbers, mismatched font.

Problem #2:

This starts to get old. You might like it – but trust me – your family, friends, team mates, managers don’t. While the nervous kinetic energy might be empowering for you, it’s annoying to them.

Problem #3:

We are not working smart. Team work is about playing to our strengths, getting leverage, the whole > sum of the parts. If we are the bottleneck, this little “production system” is a little broken.

Problem #4:

We are focusing on urgent tactics, not strategy. The important, big, long-term, and life-affirming stuff get’s ignored. We are picking up nickels off the floor, instead looking for Benjamins.

What did Albert Einstein say?

I don’t need time, I need a deadline.  – Albert Einstein 

2×2 matrix: Important vs. Urgent

We are all at different S-curves of our life and no generality will apply to both you and me. That said, Steven Covey did have it right idea in 1989 when he created this 2×2 matrix. You have all seen this before.

Make 4 boxes and define important or urgent as you wish. Then spend 10 minutes dividing up your activities, time, worry, attention, money, calendar, or resources into these buckets. How did you like the ratio?

1. important, not urgent 

Yes, the more we invest in things that are IMPORTANT, NOT URGENT the more we win:

• When you look back 5 years from now, what do you want to remember?
• What is adding to your economic moat and giving you an unfair advantage?
• Who can benefit from your attention and care in a 10-to-1 ratio?
• How can you put your assets to work? Wealth is about equity (balance sheet). . . 
• Are you putting your good thoughts down on paper, blog, podcast, GitHub, portfolio?

Invest in assets that accrete in value. For me, this category looks like: 

• Developing my craft; becoming so good they can’t ignore me
• Investing and mentoring others; love my day-job as a teacher
• Writing and thinking – developing a consulting platform
• Experiences and stuff you can’t buy: core memories, travel, goodness
• Leaning out my day-to-day, repetitive tasks: a-u-t-o-m-a-t-e

2. Important, urgent 

As a professional, this is where we spend a lot of our lives. Delivering for clients. Getting the work done. Finding ways to 80/20, get a lot of output from limited inputs (data, time, billable hours). Keep doing good work friends.

If you’re a grinder like me, you can’t imagine not being a little busy. This makes us feel good (read: dopamine) to get stuff done, get thanked by other people (read: serotonin), and generally be a helpful person (read: oxytocin).

3. Not important, not urgent

Okay, this is a suspicious category. This is hygiene, necessary but boring. Some questions immediately come up:

• Can you get leverage? Is there a less-expensive person who can handle this well?
• Is this necessary? Is it CTQ? Do you have a paying customer who cares ? Have you asked them?
• Do you need to “zero-base budget” this part of your life? 
• Are you doings things out of habit, guilt, or other non-productive reasons?
• Can you make this “non-urgent” things MORE important. . can you add MORE love, effort and make it great?

4. Not important, urgent

This is what we all don’t enjoy. It’s the noise of life, and frankly, ChatGPT and all it’s sibling technologies will make some of this scheduling, trivial administration go away. This category needs to disappear:

• How can we shift this into something more predictable and asynchronous?
• How can we make this more important, and get paid for this (turn it into a business)?
• How can we “democratize” ownership of this (read: delegate) to others?
• How “really urgent” is this?  Our ability to say “no” to the right things, matters. 

Eisenhower said it first

Thanks to Pierre (comments) and Dipak (Linkedin) on the reminder that Einsenhower talk about this in the 1950s:

• Do – important and urgent 
• Decide – important and not urgent
• Delegate – not important and urgent
• Delete – not important and not urgent

Related posts:

• What Peter Drucker says about Effective Executives
• “Make the Now the primary focus of your life.” – Eckhart Tolle
• Links