The Important Versus Urgent Window

Here is a simple technique I find very useful to avoid being diverted from important tasks by trivia. Lets suppose you have a few tasks you need to get completed and you are trying to decide which ones to attack first. The temptation is to start with the urgent tasks. The issue with this is that they are not necessarily what you need to be doing. A better approach is as follows.

Take your task list and check it is complete

Split it into two equal parts one above the other – important and not important. Important must be half of the list or less. Not everything can be equally important and if you had time to do it all you would not be using this technique, you must prioritise.

Then split the tasks in each segment in half again into urgent and not urgent. Once again urgent must be half of each list or less. No cheating and making urgent tasks important retrospectively.

Now you have a list in four quarters, the strategy to tackle each quadrant is given below

And there you go, your list is now correctly prioritised with actions to be taken. If there is still too much in the “DO” box in the top left then repeat the process on the contents of that box and the “PLAN” box. Its important to use the contents of both boxes to avoid priority ordering errors in your final list.

The key thing about this method is that by asking for simple binary splits. It avoid analysis paralysis while still giving you strategies to deal with everything on your task list. By making you consider what things are important rather than merely urgent, it will help you to internalise a very useful skill over time. Eventually you may not even need to draw out the plot to prioritise correctly.