Urgent vs. Important: How Do You Prioritize?

If you have both urgent and important things to do, how do you prioritize between the two?

Some people will claim that you should always start with important tasks. After all, you don’t have the time or energy to do everything, so you’d better spend your limited time on the most important things. Others say that you should take care of urgent stuff first. Meeting deadlines is important and establishes you as a reliable and trustworthy person, which has all sorts of benefits.

Which approach is better?

Neither. There is no algorithm that can tell you how to choose between what is “urgent” and what is “important”. There is no rule you can follow that always produces the best results. To make prioritizing between competing to-dos easier, we need to dig deeper. And that begins with unpacking what “urgent” and “important” mean.

Often, people who speak about urgent vs. important items will refer to Stephen Covey or the so-called Eisenhower Matrix. You know, this graphic:

But this graphic is not terribly helpful. For starters, not everyone has the luxury of being able to delegate or eliminate tasks. You might have to do every task yourself (rather than outsourcing them), perhaps even those tasks that you consider neither urgent nor important—but your boss does. Beyond that, the world is not this simplistic. You cannot neatly pinpoint every single thing you need to do on this map.

Now, if one task is clearly very important and very urgent then, yes, you should do it first. But what if one task is very important but not urgent? How does that compare to a task that is extremely urgent yet only kind of important? Which of those two do you do first?

And what does “important” mean, anyway? Important to whom? For what reason? How do you, for example, choose between an important work task and an important family task? Family, you might respond vigorously—family always comes first! Okay, but what about a sort-of-important family task vs. an equally urgent yet incredibly important work task?

“Urgent” seems easier to unpack. But it, too, is a slippery concept. What makes a task urgent—a deadline? Not all deadlines have the same consequences. Failing to clean the house before you welcome a guest is, for most people, not as catastrophic as failing to renew a driver’s license, yet both tasks have a deadline and can therefore be “urgent”.

You get my point. This sort of matrix doesn’t help us at all. We need a different method of choosing what to spend our time on. The bad news? There is (still) no algorithm that can give us an optimal answer every time. The good news? You are perfectly capable of prioritizing intuitively, as long as you first define what matters to you and why—that is, if you clarify your values and your goals.

If you have trouble prioritizing, it is probably because you have some decisions to make. You have to decide, at a high level, how you want to spend your limited time and energy.

Which goals do you want to pursue? What do you want to get out of life? What do you value? What gives your life purpose and meaning? Where do you want to be? Which (types of) people would you like to be around? What kind of person do you want to become? Where and when do you feel happy and satisfied?

When you answer these questions—even if you answer them imperfectly—prioritization dilemmas become much easier to untangle. You’ll be able to intuitively decide what to work on day-to-day because you’ll have a “chain of whys”. Why is this task on your to-do list? Because it achieves X. Why is X important? Because it serves goal Y. Why does goal Y matter? Because I value Z.

To be clear, the clarity won’t come if your answer is “I want it all, and I want it all equally”. That’s not an answer. That’s cheating. You really do have to decide whether attending your daughter’s soccer match is more important than spending that half day revising a report or heading to the gym or attending a networking event. And you can make that decision. Just do it once and don’t re-litigate decisions every single day. That’s exhausting!

Once they reflect a bit, most people have a good sense of what’s most important to them, what’s next-most important, what comes third, and so on. You probably do too. You just have to actually take the time to reflect. And it helps to reflect in a structured way. It helps to have a process in place for periodically reflecting on your priorities and breaking them down into action steps, then deciding which action steps to work on first.

Fortunately, I know a guy who teaches just such a process. 😉

If you’re thinking yes, I should clarify my goals and my values so I can prioritize better, let’s do it together. Join Organize Your Life, my four-week live course that starts November 14. We’ll get your goals crystal clear and we’ll make a very specific plan for what you’re going to work on in the coming months. We’ll also build a system for you to repeat this exercise periodically, so you continue to spend most of your time on what matters most.

Really, what else is more important than sorting out what you should be spending your time and energy on?

See you soon.

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