Tips & Insights for Top Performance

Steven Covey, in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about one of the traps for ineffective people is getting caught in doing the urgent rather than the important. Bottom-line this 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 care for the important you will have less urgent things to deal with. There will always be truly urgent things, but these are called emergencies, not daily urgent tasks. Make a list and determine what is important for you to do to move forward with your business (or life). What do you need to do in order to accomplish these goals? This is what is important.

Important things 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 us had in school with reading. The teacher gives us what is important to read each week. Students are busy and do not read what is important and then a few days before the test when there is 200 pages of reading, the assignment now 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.

This is one of Steven Covey’s foundational books on how to be effective and productive. There are many great tips and strategies in this book. One of the most common is the 4 box grid which helps identify the important vs. urgent. In our society today it is almost impossible to NOT get swept up in the urgent, reacting to all the things that pop up around us and demand our time. If you do not deal with the important eventually everything becomes urgent and a crisis.

You have a choice every day. Will your day run you or will you run your day? Will you live in the urgent or important? The feelings of unproductivity, insanity and chaos occur when you constantly live in the urgent. To shift and balance urgent with important and actually RUN your day, you must have a clear handle on what is important and know how to handle the urgent things that come up so they do not derail you from accomplishing the important. Check out this book to master your skills.