Tips & Insights for Top Performance

Steven Covey, in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about one of the traps of people is getting caught in doing the urgent rather than the important. Bottom-line this trap is reacting to life rather than responding.  While urgent things will come up, they seem to happen more when you are not planning. Eventually everything will become a crisis. STOP. When you give attention to what is important you will have less urgent things to deal with. There will always be truly urgent things, but these are called emergencies and priorities, not daily urgent tasks. Spend some of your day on this area, but spend more of it on what is important. Make a list and determine what is important for you to do to move forward with your business (or life).

Important things often seem like it will not matter if they get done today or tomorrow and therefore often are perpetually put off until tomorrow or until they become urgent. It is similar to the bad habit many of have in school with projects or homework. The teacher gives important weekly assignments, i.e. pages to read for the week. Students are busy and do not read what is important and let it go until a few days before the test when there is 200 pages of reading, now the assignment becomes urgent. Thus the cycle begins as we create urgent tasks that would not be urgent if we did the important things we need to do each day.

Action:

• Recognize the cycle and how much time you spend reacting to the urgent

• List what you are trying to accomplish (your goal)

• What is important to do today to reach that goal?

• What is important this week to reach that goal?

• Highlight these things on your to-do list

• Block at least one hour in your day to do the important tasks

• Force yourself to do the important today and watch how the overflow of urgent tasks decrease off your plate