How I Do Important / Urgent Prioritisation
One prioritisation technique is to classify tasks as important vs urgent. Here’s how I apply that framework:
“Importance” is how severe the consequences will be — over any time period — if you don’t do it. For example, developing your skills as a professional is important. But trivial things like paying your electricity bill are also important, because otherwise your electricity will be shut off. Importance is not about whether the task is intellectual; it’s about how bad things will get if you don’t do it.
Notice that the first sentence in the last paragraph mentioned “over any time period”. Exercising is maximum importance since your health will degenerate otherwise, maybe after a decade or two. So it’s about how severe the consequence will be, not when it will occur. What does it mean to say that exercising is maximum importance? It means I should decline any meetings scheduled at that time, even if it’s a prospective client because the getting a client is less important to me than me living a healthy, happy and long life. If you don’t do this, it shows that you’re confused about the concept of importance.
If importance is about the severity of the consequences and not the time, urgency is the opposite: it’s about the time of the consequences, not their severity. In other words, urgency is: what are the immediate consequences?
Now that we understand importance and urgency, the key message of this blog post is:
Prioritise tasks by importance.
Ignore urgent but unimportant tasks.
For example, when I was running my startup, I often missed responding to candidates who applied but whom we rejected 1. That was urgent (responding two months late wouldn’t help) but unimportant (to the success of the startup).
When I talk about doing tasks, it doesn’t mean that you should personally do them. You can always delegate them, if you have the right people to delegate to 2.
Don’t suffer from urgency addiction, where you feel compelled to do something, anything, because you’ve confused activity for progress. It’s like you can’t sit in one place because you feel you’re not moving towards your destination. So you keep running randomly, going in circles without realising it. You psychologically feel that you’re now making progress, but in reality, you’re no closer to your goal.
Because we did not use an ATS or other structured way to track candidates, not because I didn’t want to.
One school of that holds that if it’s urgent but not important, you should delegate it. But you should delegate it in any case if someone else can do it and if there’s something more important for you to focus on. So, to me, delegation is completely independent of the important / urgent prioritisation framework.