A key part of being productive is understanding and leveraging the distinction between importance and urgency. It’s a distinction that gets overlooked or misunderstood quite often. And when that happens, it’s part of what drives us to do a lot of stuff, but feel like we’re not getting anywhere.
In the simplest of terms, importance means that something is weighty—it matters greatly to you for some reason. But it’s not something that needs to be done right now. Urgency, on the other hand, means that something needs to be done right away. Or at least, it seems like something needs to get done right away.
Why We Don’t Act on the Important Things
I could wax philosophical at length about whether or not most of the urgent tasks in our lives really do need to be done immediately, or merely seem that way. But whatever the case, urgent things exert a force on us. We feel them pulling here and now—which is why we tend to be good at taking care of urgent things.
Unfortunately, the important things in our lives rarely overlap with the urgent ones. They’re usually the result of a desire we have, and a long-term plan to make it happen. And that long-term plan doesn’t have hard deadlines, because we’re usually the only ones that care whether the important stuff gets done within a certain timeline.
And so we end up deploying an overwhelming majority of our time and attention on urgent things. As a result, we put less of our time and attention into the big, important projects.
For many of us, this is a real problem. We see ourselves continuing to get sucked in by what’s new and urgent. Day in, day out, we sacrifice the important at the altar of the urgent.
But if we get creative, we can turn the tide.
The Critical Intersection
It’s likely that you have a bunch of stuff on your to-do list. And it’s also likely that some of those things are urgent. If they don’t get done today, there will be some pain. So those items will get your attention—barring some even more urgent distraction.
You might even have an item or two that is both urgent and important. Not only will there be some pain if you don’t get this thing done right away, but it also contributes to a very meaningful goal of yours.
Those items exist at a critical intersection. The inherent push that urgent items have meet up with the existential meaning embedded in important items. It’s at this intersection where you make breakthroughs. Because you’re basically forced to act quickly on an item that helps you toward a meaningful goal, you get the benefits of both kinds of tasks.
Make Urgency Work for You
Part of what I realized when I first began using The Today System is that it is possible to create urgency where it might not otherwise exist. You can apply that urgency to important items that wouldn’t otherwise become urgent. And when you do that, you make progress on items that usually get put off.
The main mechanism for manufacturing urgency is the scoring system on the card each day. If you put important, goal-serving items at the top of your card each day, they become urgent. If you don’t do those items, and focus on the urgent things that pop up, your score suffers badly. Your brain knows this as you look at the card and check your score so far.
If there is one benefit that defines The Today System at its most basic level, it is that ability to turn the important into the urgent through the scoring system. That benefit continues each day, so long as you know what your important goals are and put items that serve those goals at the top of the card.
After that, it’s all about working the numbers. Push to get the best score you can. Feel that superficial thrill of scoring high point values when you take care of top items on your card. Then feel the second greater thrill of having taken care of the important stuff that you would have otherwise sacrificed while attending to the “urgent” stuff of the day.
Fill out a card today. Be intentional with your time and attention. Leverage your natural attraction to the urgent by making the important things urgent. Give them a number today—one that pushes you to make it happen. Do enough of that each day, and you’ll find your big goals getting accomplished much sooner.
