Overcoming the Addiction to the Urgent

Steven Covey, in one of his wonderful management books titled First Things First, talks about a trap many of us fall into: addiction to the urgent. Covey concisely surmises this conundrum by dividing up working time into different quadrants . In quadrant one should be the truly urgent issues : pressing deadlines or "people problems" that absolutely must be dealt with immediately. These issues will truly make a difference in the health of any business endeavor. Spending a good amount of time here is (unfortunately) necessary for anyone with executive or management responsibility.

After this quadrant, things get interesting, or shall I say, counterproductive. As Covey points out, our natural tendency is to spend the rest of our time in "Quadrant Two" on "urgent" matters which turn out not to be truly important , but, nonetheless, "urgent." In this category are numerous time-wasters like non-vital phone calls, memos and meetings, none of which will really make a strategic difference in the short-term or long-term outcome of whether our endeavors succeed or fail.

Covey astutely points out that, rather than spending our time in this quadrant, we need to move to a different quadrant involving long-term planning - which, while strategically crucial, may not appear to be "urgent." Here's where we do the "advance work" of planning, preparation and reflection, the careful mulling over of major decisions, personnel issues and so on. Here is where our future successes are visualized and plotted, and where future failures or hassles can be averted. Covey's point is that we never get to this vital quadrant if we get snared by the "urgent" yet non-vital.

Bottom Line: figure out what's strategically important and can only be done by yourself . If any one else can possibly handle it, let them. If only you can produce what's required, then do it-as quickly as possible. Then get out of the "urgent mode" and back into the thinking and planning quadrant.

by CV Doner, PhD