Many people continue to ask me how can I separate the important things to do from the constant call of the urgent things to do? What a great question. The term generally applied to this is in relationship to “Time Management.” I always respond to this question the same way, you can’t separate them, but you can prioritize them. You will always have the urgent, but you must focus on the important. The urgent will take care of itself over time as they get handled in terms of priority. Just because someone else needs something done on their timetable, doesn’t automatically mean that timetable becomes yours. I call this separation “Priority Management.”
We know that many business people fall prey to the call of the urgent and get buried so deep within their businesses, they can only escape when they have no energy left for the important things of the business.
How do you deal with this? If your strategy is working and you are able to complete two or more important things everyday, then you do not need to read any more here, but if not, I encourage you to read the next several articles in the weeks ahead.
Priority Management operates under the context we all have the same amount of time, so what separates successful people from less successful people is how they spend the time. Successful people spend their time working on the MOST IMPORTANT PRIORITIES and allowing the urgent stuff to get done at their convenience on not the convenience of the person creating the urgency. Because, if you think about it, the majority of urgent matters we must deal with are almost always someone else’s issue – aren’t they?
Dr. Townsend called this “Doing the hardest thing first,” and then “Doing the next hardest thing.” I can promise you if you take this work strategy, your days, weeks, and months will be far more effective.
So, if we can begin this process by developing a list of the most important things we need to accomplish for the BHAG to become closer to reality what would that be? Over the next several articles, we are going to begin developing a Priority Management model THAT WORKS! If you will do the things we suggest, I promise you, your level of effectiveness and peace about your production will increase dramatically, if not exponentially. So, how do we start? For starters, let’s outline what we will be talking about in the next several articles.