Important vs urgent – two separate questions

Important work moves you towards a result that matters. Urgent work needs a response soon. Ask these questions separately so the loudest request does not always win.

Four decisions

• Act Now: important and urgent. Start where delay costs most. If the list stays full, review your commitments and what could have started earlier.
• Plan Ahead: important without a pressing deadline. Give it a start date so it gets room in your day before it becomes urgent.
• Offload: urgent with little value in the outcome. Before doing it, check whether you can simplify, hand it over or decline.
• Sort: neither important nor urgent yet, or still unclear. During a review, choose the next decision: clarify, give it a date, move it to another quadrant, archive or delete.

What to do

1. Ask two separate questions. "What changes if I never do this?" is about importance. "When is this genuinely needed?" is about urgency.
2. Check where the urgency comes from. A real deadline, or just someone's expectation, an "ASAP" tag, a red badge?
3. Leave daily room for Plan Ahead. Even one small step keeps that quadrant from turning into a warehouse of intentions.
4. Look for another route for Offload. Simplify, batch, hand over, or decline politely – see What to delegate, simplify or decline.
5. Sort is not a bin. It may hold ideas that aren't ready yet. Review them rather than deleting them on autopilot.

Example

Olena keeps the books at a small company. Every morning colleagues write "need this today": reconcile an invoice, dig out an old contract. Meanwhile, the company switches accounting software in two months and the data-migration plan still doesn't exist. Asking the two questions separately puts the invoice in Offload (needs a quick response, but an error has low consequences in this example) and the migration plan in Plan Ahead. She gives it Thursday's date and keeps the first hour of that day for it.

In Plynno

Choose a quadrant for importance and urgency, and a date for your plan. Changing the date does not move a task to another quadrant.

Try this now

Take three tasks from today's list. For each, finish one sentence: "If I don't do this, then…". Compare the answers with the quadrant each task sits in.

Sources

• Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2018). The Mere Urgency Effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 673–690. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy008
• Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.