Focus on Important Things

The Performance High

Some professionals thrive under pressure, polishing final revisions the night before a presentation or running conference calls back to back. The body cooperates enthusiastically. Endorphins mask the pain, dopamine delivers the sense of achievement and, when the crunch is team-based, serotonin adds the warm glow of taking one for the team.1 All those happiness chemicals conspire to create an addiction to the performance high of last-minute work. The uncomfortable question follows: is this really a way to live, when the slow, important, non-urgent things wait unattended?

Four Problems With the Adrenaline Career

Most consultants and motivated professionals get a thrill from crushing work at the last minute, because busy feels important. Triaging the most urgent items first sounds logical, though it describes an emergency department more than a career. Four problems accumulate. First, small mistakes multiply, because the last-minute run-up leaves no time to proofread, producing typos, missing page numbers and mismatched fonts. Second, the act gets old. The nervous kinetic energy may feel empowering to you while it steadily annoys family, friends, teammates and managers. Third, it is not working smart. Teamwork means playing to strengths and gaining leverage so the whole exceeds the sum of parts, and a person who becomes the bottleneck breaks that production system. Fourth, and worst, urgency crowds out strategy. The important, big, long-term, life-affirming work gets ignored while we pick up nickels off the floor instead of hunting Benjamins. Even Albert Einstein confessed the seduction: "I don't need time, I need a deadline."

The Matrix That Sorts It Out

Everyone rides different S-curves of life, so no generality fits all, yet Stephen Covey had the right idea in 1989 with his two-by-two matrix of important versus urgent.2 The exercise is simple. Draw four boxes, define important and urgent however you wish, then spend ten minutes distributing your activities, time, worry, attention, money, calendar and resources into the buckets. Most people dislike the ratio they discover, which is precisely the point of drawing it.

Important, Not Urgent: Where You Win

The more we invest in important-but-not-urgent work, the more we win, and a few questions locate it. What do you want to remember when you look back five years from now? What adds to your economic moat and unfair advantage? Who could benefit from your attention at a ten-to-one return? Are your assets working, since wealth lives on the balance sheet? Are your best thoughts landing on paper, a blog, a podcast or a portfolio? Concretely, the quadrant holds developing your craft until you are too good to ignore, investing in and mentoring others, writing and thinking toward a platform, collecting experiences money cannot buy and automating the repetitive tasks that leak time. These are assets that accrete in value, and compounding needs time you must consciously grant.

The Other Three Quadrants

Important and urgent work is where professionals rightly spend much of their lives, delivering for clients and finding ways to extract maximum output from limited data, time and billable hours. Grinders cannot imagine not being a little busy, and the neurochemical rewards of finishing, being thanked and being helpful are real. Keep doing good work; just refuse to let this quadrant become the whole map.

Not important and not urgent is the suspicious category of hygiene tasks, necessary and boring. Interrogate it. Can a less expensive resource handle this well? Is it truly critical to quality, with a paying customer who cares? Does this corner of life need zero-based budgeting? Are habits, guilt or other unproductive motives keeping tasks alive? Alternatively, can some of it be elevated, given more love and effort until it becomes great rather than tolerated?

Not important but urgent is the noise of life, the quadrant that should disappear. Emerging technologies will erase some of the trivial scheduling and administration on their own. For the rest: shift work into predictable, asynchronous forms, turn some of it into a business if someone will pay, delegate ownership to others and ask how urgent things really are. The ability to say no to the right things matters more than any productivity application.

Making the Shift Stick

Knowing the matrix changes nothing without mechanisms that defend the important quadrant. Schedule the important-not-urgent work first, in recurring calendar blocks treated as unbreakable as client meetings, because unscheduled importance always loses to scheduled urgency. Impose personal deadlines on the deadline-free work, converting Einstein's confession into a tool: the craft project due nowhere gets a due date anyway. Review the four boxes monthly rather than once, since urgency creep is constant and silent. Enlist a colleague or partner to ask what you did this month that will matter in five years, a question that embarrasses precisely when it should. The addiction to the performance high fades the same way other addictions do, through substitute rewards, and shipping compounding work turns out to deliver a better high than surviving another deadline.

Eisenhower Said It First

Credit where due, and thanks to attentive readers for the reminder: Dwight Eisenhower described the same discipline in the 1950s, decades before the matrix acquired its modern branding.3 His four verbs remain the cleanest summary ever offered. Do the important and urgent. Decide, meaning schedule, the important and not urgent. Delegate the not important and urgent. Delete the not important and not urgent. Four verbs, one matrix and a standing invitation to stop confusing adrenaline with achievement.

• 1Dopamine
• 2The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• 3Dwight D. Eisenhower