The Most Urgent Thing on Your Schedule Today

If you’ve read Steven Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, then you’ll recognise his distinction between urgent and important tasks, as illustrated in the table below. Covey argues that most of us spend too long in the left-hand column, either firefighting or rushing to meet deadlines in the top left quadrant, or wasting our time on unimportant busywork in the bottom left quadrant. If we really want to achieve something remarkable, Covey says, we should spend all of our time in the top two quadrants, and none of it in the bottom two quadrants (after all, if it’s not important, why do it?).  And we should spend as much time as possible in the top right quadrant, on the important-but-not-urgent tasks that create long-term value for others and long-term success for ourselves.

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