I’ve had this quote on my cube wall for some time now (attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower):
What is important is seldom urgent,
and what is urgent is seldom important.
It’s been hanging out there, staring at me, but I haven’t really broken it down until recently.
During one of my plunges down the YouTube rabbit-hole, I came across this video that explained the difference between urgent and important:
Of course, I’d heard of the Eisenhower Matrix before — or at least seen it — but it wasn’t until I watched this video that I realized I’d never really thought about prioritizing my Urgent tasks and my Important tasks differently.
My to-do list has been a running joke for years. Before the advent of smartphones (and long before bullet journals were a thing), I’d come home from work with a little sheet of scrap paper full of non-work-related stuff I’d thought of during the day but couldn’t act on yet. I literally had a stack some two inches tall on my desk at home, full of half-finished to-do lists. With my phone and my bullet journals, I’ve become a little more organized… but I still have dozens upon dozens of tasks in my TeuxDeux app.
Now that I understand that urgent (time-sensitive) is different from important (vital to achieve your goals or support your values), I’ve been categorizing my tasks as they come in.
Luckily, TeuxDeux is smart enough to keep the tasks under their respective customized subheadings as they migrate forward from day to day, until I mark them complete.
It honestly takes me a few moments to evaluate each task. Will things go to shit if I don’t do this by a certain time? Urgent and important. Something that should really be done, but that isn’t necessarily time-sensitive? Important but not urgent. Once we get to tasks that are not important, exactly, but are things that I’d really like to get done regularly — say, watering my plants or syncing my iPhone photos — it gets a little muddy as to whether they qualify as urgent. They’re time-sensitive, sure, but urgent? Not really.
Somewhat surprising to me was the revelation that self-care should really be labeled as important. Jessica from How to ADHD, in her video above, uses the examples of meditation and exercise as Important But Not Urgent (or #ibnu for short).
Somewhat related: in a recent Weight Watchers meeting workshop, we were discussing ways to distract ourselves from eating our emotions — especially negative ones. I brought up writing as a method I use to get things out of my head and get my thoughts organized.
Finally, I put all this together and realized that blogging — actually, just writing or journaling in general — is important for my own mental health. I mean, I knew that already, but I guess maybe I’d forgotten… or I hadn’t realized how important journaling really is to how my brain works.
I don’t write just so I don’t forget things that have happened; I write to fully understand them, process them, learn from them, and stop them from circling around in my head.
Important and Urgent.