Important but not urgent

Last week I was reminded about the framework of important vs. urgent. It creates four quadrants namely important and urgent; important but not urgent; urgent but not important; not important and not urgent. That helps us to classify our activities into four of them instead of focusing on the urgent staffs regardless the importance of focusing on important stuffs and ignoring those who are urgents.

What I forgot was the recommendation that we need to increase the percentage of important but not urgent activities. At first I thought that we need to do the important and urgent stuffs. That is true, but if all of our activities are there, life would be more stressful as everything becomes urgent. We also do not want to have too many urgent but not important stuffs such as receiving calls or sudden requests. If it can be delegated to others, we may as well do as those things are not important to us. We also do not want to do the non-urgent and non-important with the same reason that our focus is on those important to us.

In another word, we need to do more important but not urgent stuffs before they become urgent. Once they become urgent, the stress level may go up and we have one more task to manage our emotion.

This is in opposite of my habit. I tend to do things last minute as I have the urge to do it and it helps me to reduce my perfectionism given that I know it is better to submit imperfect work than not submitting at all. But if I stays with that habit, my work will become mediocre in the long run. I need to remember that those who are blessed more are encouraged to give more. It is not a must, but it is more fruitful. One way to enable giving my best is to do important things early. On the practical level, this perhaps can be done by allocating let’s say 1 hour every day for important things but not urgent in the midst of urgent things that have to be done on that day.