Lessons - Urgent & Important: This Revolutionary Method Will Transform Your Productivity Forever

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Urgent and important tasks. If you spend your days putting in fires and never feeling fulfilled by the stuff you actually get done, you're likely prioritizing, hey, it's Scott here. I want to speak about urgent and important tasks and how you can fix your priorities to get more done. Now, thanks to a study called The Mirror Urgency Effect, I nerded out, I went down the rabbit hole, I found this study that shows that we finally have evidence behind a bad habit most of us are guilty of. Prioritizing urgent tasks over important ones. So why is this so detrimental to our lives? Why do we focus on the things that are so stressful but actually not moving the needle? I'm going to break down why and then also what we can do to fix it. So we are, as human beings, more likely to focus on time-sensitive tasks, even if they're not as value-driving as other tasks. This is getting a little bit complicated. Let me actually explain these two adjectives, urgent and important. A lot of people would say, hey, they kind of mean the same thing, right? No, they don't. Not quite. So spend your days putting your fires and never feeling fulfilled by the stuff you actually get done, you're likely prioritizing urgent tasks, aka those with deadlines. Over important tasks that will deliver more value in the long run. This is what's called the urgent important matrix or the Eisenhower matrix, an easy to understand and highly effective way of organizing tasks so that you can focus on what really matters in life. Let's take a closer look. And important are not the same. Urgent tasks have a funny way of feeling much more important than they actually are. Whether it's a deadline associated with them, the pressure from a colleague to get it done, or simply their sense of immediacy. Urgent tasks can seem like they're the be-all and end-all. It takes so much of our attention, in fact, that we forget about the important tasks. Things that help us reach our long-term goals. Things that have a higher payout than smaller urgent tasks. Now, are you prioritizing low-value tasks? I'm going to pose a scenario to you. See if you can relate. It's 8 a.m. on a Monday morning. This week, your goal is to upgrade the onboarding pipeline for new users, making it smoother, more intuitive, it'll bring a lot more clients onboard, it'll increase your company's profits substantially. You plan on spending the first two hours of each day working towards this particular goal. You open your laptop, you're immediately bombarded with the emails, how many times that happened to all of us, of course, requesting small changes to existing websites and web pages. You can clearly see that these updates are going to make a huge difference, but they're not going to move the needle on your onboarding project. But you feel they're urgent, and your colleagues clearly need them done ASAP. By the time you're finished implementing, be small little changes your two hours are up. You need to move on with other daily responsibilities, and you haven't had a chance to work on the onboarding project. Does this sound familiar? Because it does, for me, it happens all the damn time. What often happens in this situation is that we're so driven by the need to meet deadlines official or self-imposed, that we skip the process of assessing which task is more valuable. Believe it or not, someone in history who deeply understood this fallacy and worked to resolve this in his own life was a 34th president of the United States to wipe the Eisenhower. Now he said, especially when our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future. Eisenhower believed that urgent tasks aren't always important, and that important tasks aren't always urgent. And thanks to Steven Covey, author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, we can now understand exactly what he meant. Now, this is where the Eisenhower matrix comes in. Covey created the matrix to help the everyday business person, individual, entrepreneur, prioritized tasks and projects. I personally live by this approach because like many of you, my life as an entrepreneur is filled with air quotes, urgent tasks. The matrix is simple. This is what it is. It sorts all of your tasks into four squares, all of which correspond to a different plan of attack. Visualize it as a two by two grid with an urgent and not urgent on the x-axis and important and not important on the y-axis. Here's a breakdown of each square. The first square, urgent and important. Here the time-sensitive and high-value tasks collide. These are the tasks that have to be handled immediately. They require full attention. They should be taken care of as soon as possible. For example, I consider these to be both urgent and important. An emergency meeting with a large client who's considering leaving your business. It's urgent because they're moments away from walking out that door and it's important because, well, a successful negotiation could mean maintained profits in the long run. Now, a website bug that's driving away customers. You are literally losing money with each passing minute. Of course, you have to fix this as soon as possible, potentially off-boarding a disgruntled client. While there isn't an immediate financial consequence, it's still important to handle this quickly before any further damage is done. You can't predict how this client will react to the termination of their contract or whether it's advertised your business in some way. To actually determine which tasks are urgent and important, this needs to be a very intentional planning process. Before your brain will default to prioritizing all tasks based on urgency alone. Second square is urgent but not important. These are tasks that require attention but do not have a significant impact on the bottom line. You can safely delegate these to team members and you should as soon as possible. I am speaking about things like submitting projects to clients. You're abiding by a predetermined deadline but it's a low skill task that does not require your personal attention. Get someone else to take care of those submissions. Proofreading this week's company newsletter, even if you're committed to sending these out on the same day every week, you do not personally need to take care of the proofreading. That's what editors are for. Answering customer questions that don't relate to urgent orders or complaints. These can be handled by your support team without any involvement from you at all. Delegation is one of the most powerful skills you can master and I will do a full segment on delegation but don't worry about that. This third square is not urgent but important. Here things get interesting. These are tasks that can easily be pushed to the bottom of your priorities list because they don't appear urgent but they should never be ignored. These are tasks that will have long term and preventative impact on your business. Developing new marketing strategies for acquiring customers in competitive market. This requires research and brainstorming and it will take some time but it's important to stay ahead of the curve and the competition and acquire customers in a way that is both cost effective and long lasting. Another thing you've got to do is team training sessions. Now learning and development may not seem urgent but high morale, upskilling education is important for any business and you can expect your team to be well versed in the roles without the proper training sessions. Another thing could be gathering feedback from customers. Feedback is a great way to ensure your product services business are meeting the needs of the customers and it's important to understand what you can do better in the future so that you won't forget about these tasks or push them down your list for too long. They need to be scheduled because they still have to be done. Now you set up a recurring task and your calendar to work on these not urgent but important tasks in the future. The fourth square is not urgent and not important. This is the delete pile. Trust me, you don't need to think twice about these. If you've got tasks on your list that are unimportant and not time bound, they're literally just a waste of time. A few examples could include going down the LinkedIn rabbit hole. You might disguise this as competitive research but let's be honest, all this does is waste your time. Attending events that have no purpose. How often do we do this? Networking is an excellent thing to do but if you're simply attending something for a good social media post, it's a waste of time. Updating company job listings. Are you happy with the current team? Do you need new applicants? If so, then that's great. But if not, maybe doing things like updating job descriptions or whatever, it's not progress as procrastination. There's one example of two million examples of ways that we procrastinate every single day. Some of these tasks can be eliminated altogether. Some can be safely forgotten about until a later date. But you have to build your own Eisenhower habit and matrix. So the study I was mentioning earlier, we humans are impulsive with our prioritization. We're going to default to the tasks that feel the most urgent. That is, unless we intentionally built a habit of using an Eisenhower matrix. Carve out a few minutes each morning to review the task list and categorize each one to the matrix. You will be surprised at how quickly you start seeing a difference in the way you prioritize tasks. And as a result, get more done. If this was valuable for you, if you're watching this on YouTube, please like, comment, subscribe, hit the bell, do all the YouTube things. If you're listening to this via podcasts, share it with somebody you'd find it useful. And if you have feedback, of course, leave it in the comments below. Any other topics you want me to cover.