Urgent: Fun, or induced by Fear.

Posted: May 16, 2015

Most of what we do at work all day is one of these three.

Fun: It's engaging, it gives us satisfaction, people smile.

Urgent: Someone else (or perhaps we) decided that this paper is on fire and it has to be extinguished before anything else happens.

Induced by Fear: Most common of all, the things we do to protect ourselves from the fear we'd have to sit with if we didn't do them.

Not on this list: important.

Steven Covey's 2x2 matrix is really helpful in understanding what do do with urgent VS important work. Urgent usually gets handled. Then we spend our time on not-urgent & not-important as a way to reward ourselves.

A day spent doing important work is rare. And precious.

It can only happen on purpose.