Do what s important, not what s urgent.... What exactly does that mean? What s the difference? Aren t most things that are urgent also important? No, not necessarily. Most people reading this article lead busy, hectic lives. If you work and have children, especially young children, you know exactly what I m talking about. You get up tired, work hard, go to bed late without doing everything you needed to get accomplished that day and you repeat the process day after day. You think on your feet, eat on the run, and plan your life using the "just in time" model. Most things come at you as urgent, with a "you ve got to do this right now"
label attached (either literally or figuratively). It s easy to jump on problem after problem and soon you find that you ve become a fire truck, putting out fires all the time.
How do you fix the things that start the fires? How do you do that when you feel like your life is a merry-go-round going 90 MPH and you re hanging on by your fingertips? You stop automatically responding to everything that s demanding your attention. You handle the important things first. You ask yourself, is this important? Will it be important a week, a month, a year from now? How will it affect my children? Will it put money in my pocket or take it away? Is it important to someone I care about? Will it make my marriage better or will it hurt my marriage? Will it make me healthier? The list goes on and on.
We re a society, both in our personal lives and in our businesses, that has instant gratification at the center of most decisions and activities. We should look farther down the road and try to see how decisions made today will have an impact on our future. Even decisions that may seem harmless can have drastic implications. For instance, I just did a quick search on Yahoo to find the average TV viewing time per person. I found one study that says according to the Total TV Audience Monitor (T-TAM), DVR (digital video recorder) owners watch an average of 29.25 hours of TV in a week. That s 1521 hours per year or 63 days. Two months of time wasted. Is that good or bad? I think its bad. How much happier we d be, how much stronger our marriages and relationships with our children would be, how much healthier we d be, how much smarter we d be, if we turned off the TV. In many homes the TV is like a light bulb, it s on as soon as you come home and off when you go to bed. In some houses, there s a TV in every room of the house. Not all TV is bad, but for the most part it s a waste of time. If you leave it on while you re doing other things, then it s a distraction that you could do without.
It s my opinion that in addition to wasting time, most television programming chips away at moral values we desperately need to cling to and instill in our children.
Here s another example, the phone. Most of us have a home phone and a cell phone. If you re married, your spouse probably has a cell phone. If you have children, they may or may not have cell phones. That s a lot of phones! One nice thing about current phones is that they have caller ID. Usually you can tell who is calling. Well guess what, you don t HAVE to answer the phone when it rings. We ve been programmed to think we must jump up and get the phone.
Why? True, sometimes it s important and before caller ID you really didn t have a way to know who was on the other end without answering the call, but now you do. It feels strange at first, almost a guilty feeling, when you know who s calling and you don t answer the phone. The phone is a device that yells out urgency when it rings, but you have the ability to only answer if it s important. If it s not important, don t answer it and return the call later, after you ve finished whatever you were doing when the phone rang - but only if you want to.
When someone asks you to do something, or when you start to do something, even activities you ve been doing all along, ask yourself is this urgent or is it important? Is there something that s more important that I could be doing, maybe something that s displaying a sense of urgency, but that is more important? You ll soon find it easy to say "no" to the urgent and "yes" to the important. And, you ll stop putting out fires all the time.
What can you do with the extra time? Spend it with your spouse and or your children, decide to learn something new such as how to make web sites, or build your future nest egg by learning how to make money on the Internet, or learn to play an instrument, or teach your children how to play an instrument, take singing lessons, plant a garden, visit a retirement center or a hospital... the list goes on forever.
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