Do you want to achieve more? Focus on important but not urgent tasks
By: David Cui
Tags: Reading, Focus, Books, Productivity, Careers

Do you want to achieve more? Focus on important but not urgent tasks David Cui Follow May 20 · 5 min read

Three steps to achieve extroordinary productivity, based on learning from The 5 Choices

Photo by Ryland Dean on Unsplash

Introduction

It has been a long day, busy busy and busy. You had several meetings, replied hundreds of emails/messages, and tried your best to get some work done. However, by the end of the day, you do not feel accomplished. You have always wished that you can spend more time on an innovative project proposal. It has been a few months since the last workout in the gym. You would like to catch up with people you care about but just never get the time to do so. Also, you have heard about some new technology in your field and am worried that you are not being up to date about it.

How would a dream workday look like to you?

You wake up and clear your mind. After breakfast and a good workout, you start to work on the innovative project proposal. You make good progress on it. Then you attend a few meetings and reply a few important emails. Lunch time. You catch up with someone you care about and it feels great. In the afternoon, you go through unanswered emails and handle them accordingly. In the end, you find some time to look into this new technology. Before leaving the office, you make your plan for tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Sounds great! But how can I have a workday like that?

I will walk you through three steps to turn your busy while not-fulfilling workday into a day with extroordinary productivity. The content is mostly from The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity in case you would like to learn more.

Step 1: Identify your Q2 projects

As a starting point, make a list of projects/tasks/things you spent time on. You can use your calendar to help you track how you spent your day. For anything that took you more than 10 mins, it worths to log it in your calendar.

Next, add thing you wish you have spent time on but did not to the list.

Now, review each item on your list, and ask yourself two questions:

How much attention did this item draw from me? If the item drew a lot of attention from you, it is urgent. Otherwise, it is not urgent. Looking back, how important is this item for me, in terms of career growth/relationship/health/happiness? If the item means a lot to you, it is important. Otherwise, it is not important.

Based on the above two questions, you tasks (what you did and what you wished you did) belong to the following categories:

Q1: Urgent and Important. Those are items that you are probably hired for. Urgent escalations, deliverable with close deadlines, important meetings.

Q2: Important but not urgent. This is the category of your dream workday. Creative projects, relationship building, learning and development, recharge yourself.

Q3: Urgent but not important. This category is interesting. When you get to them, you feel that they are urgent. But looking back, they are really not important. For example, someone sends you a message for a quick question, an email with some FYI info.

Q4: Neither urgent nor important. This category includes items that you should not spend time on.

Where do the projects that you wish you spent more time on lie? Many people find they are mostly in Q2: important but not urgent.

Q2 is your focus to achive extraordinary productivity.

Step 2: Schedule your Q2 projects

So far, you have identified your Q2 projects. The next question is, how can you spend more time on those tasks?

The biggest challenge that blocks us to spend more time on Q2 tasks is that they are not urgent. They do not draw our attentions. Instead, Q3 tasks, the urgent but not important ones, can easily get our attention and steal our time from Q2 tasks. As an example, imagine that you just start your workday with the plan to work on an important proposal (the Q2 task). Before you start working on the proposal, you receive a few emails that draw your attention (for example, a email update for a project that you only need to be informed, someone asking you for information, or even a survey questionairre). Those emails can definitely wait (Q3 tasks), but the unread status of those emails in your inbox create a feeling of urgency so that you click into the email, read through them one by one, and before you realize it, your next meeting comes up.

To overcome this tendency to spend time on Q3 tasks before you work on Q2 tasks, you can schedule those Q2 tasks on your calendar and treat them as meetings. Instead of “planning to spend some time writing the proposal today”, schedule an one-hour meeting “write proposal X” on your calendar in your high efficiency time (for example, morning before meetings). By scheduling this meeting, you create a feeling of urgency when the “meeting” pops up, and it also prevents other items to distract you.

Now, how do you make sure that you do schedule those “Q2 meetings”? You can schedule a weekly Q2 planning session (30 mins) on your calendar to list your Q2 tasks for a week and schedule them accordingly. Sunday night, Monday morning, or Friday afternoon are potential timeslots for you to do the planning. You will also need to adjust your calendar daily for urgent meetings/tasks (Q1 tasks) by spending 10 mins per day to review progress in Q2 tasks and make adjustment accordingly

Step 3: Manage your emails (and other incoming distractions)

All plannings look great until they are destroyed by unexpected interruptions. To protect your precious Q2 time, you need a system to manage distractions. Below I use email management as an example.

The best way to manage distractions is to automate your processing process. This saves your willpower. For emails, you can leverage automatic rules to process most of your emails without being distracted when they come.

Here is how it works. Firstly, create three folders under your inbox: one for emails with you in the to line (emails directly addressed to you), one for emails with you in the cc line, and one for other emails (you are not in to or cc). Secondly, set up email auto rules, where emails with you in the to line directly go to the “to”folder, similarly for cc and other folders.

Apply these rules to both existing and incoming emails. Now, your inbox is empty. More than that, you won’t see the unread icon pop up to distract you when new emails come.

You will still check your emails regularly. The difference is that, this auto rule system lets you control when you want to check your emails (proactively) instead of letting incoming emails dominate your attention (reactively).

You can set up your own schedule to check emails. For example, I check emails in the “to” folder every hour to make sure that I do not miss important emails. For “cc” folder, every two hours is sufficient (you are only cc’ed anyway). For “other” folder, I do not check them in the morning. When I am less productive in the afternoon, I will review them. In fact, most of emails in the “other” folder can be deleted with no actions required.

Summary

Try the above three steps to focus your energy on Q2 tasks: the important but not urgent ones, the ones that really make you successful.