The principle of priority - Focus on what is important not urgent

The Principle of priority -You must focus on what is important and not urgent.

This quote I randomly picked up from, where I cannot remember now. But the moment I read it I picked up the significance. Did you? If you did not read the quote again.

PS: apparently origin of this traced to Stephen Covey the author of the book "The seven habits of highly effective people".

In the first instance it seem there is something wrong with the quote. And it feels like rubbish advice. But Behold your thought just there, drop that prejudice. I will explain why this is great advice. Let's go back to college days in memory.

The college example for the principle of priority

Prioritize

Imagine you are taking a literary class in college. And your teacher gives an assignment which needs to be handed over, by the end of month. You go home on the day 1 and what would you do? 99% of the time if you're a normal kid, of normal human parents you would just enjoy life. Doing urgent things, like going to meet a friend. Watch the final series of game of thrones. I am sure of this, unless your parents have deciplined you to start with important work, not the urgent ones. This pattern of behaviour will repeat until the last week. If you are lucky, your brain will switch to panick mode atleast few days prior to the deadline and, start working on the project. But 20% of the time still there would be some urgent things to be done, which takes precedence and you will pull an all-nighter to finish the project. This would not have happened if we focussed our attention on important things, without waiting them to become urgent ones.

This view of priority is not uncommon in any decipline. If you ask a civil engineer he would say, maintainning of a bridge is important. It is far less expensive than trying to repair a one which has history of decades of poor maintaining. Similarly, we can assume if something have become urgent, we have already missed the opportunity to address it while it was important, as we haven't prioritised properly. I'm not claiming we can always avoid such emergent situations by prioritising, minimise is a correct word we can use.

Four types of work. - Eisenhower Matrix

If you are curious I have following list of types of work. We already have discussed two. I wouldn't bother about explaining others to you as by definition they are un important. But if someone is obsessive about getting all the unimportant information than using practical advice, and for completeness I will write them down here.

Urgent and Important – crises, emergencies

Important but Not Urgent – planning, learning, relationships, prevention

Urgent but Not Important – interruptions, some meetings

Not Urgent and Not Important – distractions

Next -> story of the Monk who did not prioritize work