Years ago, I worked with a guy called Marc.
Nice enough guy, but he was a worrier. He was always worrying about whether we’d get everything done in time. (It was a big project, and we had a lot to do. I was confident that we’d do it, but he wasn’t.)
One day, after he’d once again whined, “But… wubba… maybe not finish… worry… angst?”, I turned to him and said, with great emphasis:
“Marc, if we miss the deadline, nobody dies.”
Marc’s problem was, he couldn’t separate the urgent from the important.
What makes things urgent
Urgency is connected to what psychologists call “salience”: how much we notice things.
We’re wired so that things that make us anxious are also things that we pay a lot of attention to, because they’re associated with danger. In much the same way, wasps and other poisonous creatures are often brightly coloured. Instead of trying to hide from predators, they make themselves salient – very noticeable – in a way that, predators quickly learn, means “avoid”.
Urgent things might as well be wearing flourescent yellow stripes, ringing a loud bell and dancing up and down. We know they’re urgent because we can see them there in front of us, calling attention to themselves.
What makes things important
I invite you to consider, for a moment, the difference between important people and celebrities.
Celebrities are salient. We notice them – that’s the definition of a celebrity, it’s someone most people recognise. They’re loud, colourful, and, yes, often poisonous.
Important people speak quietly, dress quietly, quietly arrange the world around them. An important person never has to stand at the head of a queue and say at the top of their voice, “Do you know who I am?” Either the service person already knows who they are and is acting accordingly, or they will be quietly informed by one of the important person’s underlings, who will quietly arrange things.
Important people may or may not be salient. But they cause things to happen on a large scale. Their presence makes a difference, in a way that the superficial celebrity doesn’t. That’s how you can tell they’re important.
Helen Clark, Richard Branson, Paris Hilton and me
Of course, it’s not just a one-dimensional scale: celebrities on one end, important people on the other. It’s one of those famous four-quadrant grids:
(Image credits, clockwise from top left: Helen Clark, by Catching Magic; Richard Branson, by David Shankbone; Paris Hilton, by Jennifer Su; Mike Reeves-McMillan, by Steve Ball.)
Top right is both influential and celebrated; bottom left is neither. You and I and just about everyone else find ourselves in that corner, but I didn’t have a picture of you handy, so I used one of myself.
Because I have a worldwide readership, I need to explain who Helen Clark is – which demonstrates that she’s not a celebrity. Probably not one person in a million, worldwide, would recognise her, but she is the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and the current head of the United Nations Development Program. This makes her, by some reckonings, the third-highest-ranking official in the UN, with responsibility for a multi-billion-dollar budget and staff in 166 countries.
I was going to use Bill Gates in that position, but you could argue that he is a bit of a celebrity. And besides, leaving Paris as the only woman is hardly fair to women in general, and I didn’t want to distract from my point, which I am about to get to.
My point
Just as being a celebrity isn’t the same as being important when it comes to people, so urgency isn’t the same as importance either when it comes to tasks. There are non-urgent important tasks, and there are unimportant urgent tasks. They are the Helen Clark and Paris Hilton of tasks. (The urgent important tasks and the non-urgent unimportant tasks we can ignore for now. There’s no conflict of levels going on there.)
So when a task is wearing big sunglasses and is all loud and, you know, like, leopard-skin print at you, what do you do?
You tell them they have to wait in line like everybody else.
And when they wail, “Do you know who I am?”, reply, “Yes, you’re one of the ones who have to wait in line like everybody else.”
Not that easy?
“But,” you may be asking, “how do I identify the urgent-but-not-important tasks in the heat of the moment? They aren’t literally walking around with dogs in their handbags.”
An excellent point (and thank you for using the word “literally” to mean “not figuratively”).
Here are a few interview questions to help you determine whether the task you are looking at is actually important or merely good at drawing attention to itself.
- What’s the worst thing that can happen if I don’t work on you right now?
- What’s the worst thing that can happen if I don’t work on you at all?
- And that’s terrible because?
- What benefits do I get from working on you now instead of later?
- And that’s good because?
If the task isn’t interviewing very well, pay attention to it, but in a very specific way.
Pay attention, rather, to the urgency vibe that you’re getting from it. Feel in your body where that urgency is. What shape is it? What texture does it have? If it had a colour and a sound, what would they be?
Hold that thought in your consciousness for a few moments.
Welcome the anxiety by name and hold it.
If the urgency starts to ebb, let it.
Is this a point at which you would feel comfortable going and getting a drink of water? A meal? A sleep, even?
Go and do that, then.
When you come back, look around you and see if you can see any important tasks that you might have been overlooking because of the wasp in the room that was the “urgent” task.
Ask:
- What could I be doing, right now, that would give me the most win per unit effort?
- What would work best to take me closer to my most important goals?
- And what benefit would I get from doing it now rather than later?
Work on that.
If you frequently find yourself putting off important tasks, by the way, you may get some benefit from my course Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding.
And if you frequently find yourself anxiously doing things because everything seems urgent, may I recommend Simple Stress Management Techniques?
This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.
, by Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein. A good, useful, practical summary of one of the most effective mind-body techniques there is for stress reduction and consequent health improvement.