Urgency Vs Importance

1 minute read

As of late I have been stressed out, suffering from a lot of self inflicted regret. Regret that I’m not getting things done.

Not getting things done has been a bit of a problem in 2014.

Over the holiday we took the Airstream up to Ocala and I set my mind to working on a few projects.

But the reality is, I needed to unwind and refresh myself more than anything. The stress of the past year had soured my mood and left my spirit more broken than I realized.

Then one evening while we were in Ocala, I came across a post by Oliver Emberton on ‘How To Master Your Time’

Oliver made the point that:

“The secret to mastering your time is to systematically focus on importance and suppress urgency. Humans are pre-wired to focus on things which demand an immediate response, like alerts on their phones – and to postpone things which are most important, like going to the gym. You need to reverse that, which goes against your brain and most of human society.”

Then it hit me, this is a source of big stress at my current job. But not even at work, I have a tendency to create little projects for myself that I treat as urgent.

But what’s important to me is that we meet our goal this year. That our family hits the road for fulltime travel.

Everything else that is demanding my attention is just a distraction.