The Urgent Versus the Important
Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.
- Stephen Covey
In 1954, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted Dr. Roscoe Miller in saying, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The idea of distinguishing between the two became known as the “Eisenhower Principle.”
An “important” activity is one that leads you towards achieving your goals: requiring, of course, that you have put some thought into what those goals are. An “urgent” activity is one that demands immediate attention or results in immediate consequences if not dealt with. Urgent activities may or may not relate to your goals; they often have more to do with someone else’s goals. Parsing the two apart is key, because we tend to give our attention to what is urgent. If we habitually neglect the important for the urgent, various patterns can surface in our lives (brainstormed in no particular order):
firefighting: putting out fires all the time rather than addressing upstream issues
lack of centeredness: being easily distracted by whatever is around us; feeling unmoored or untethered
squeaky wheel gets the grease: paying attention to the most demanding person while neglecting the others
reacting instead of responding: letting circumstances drive our feelings and actions rather than having space to consider what our response should be
busy without impact: working without achieving meaningful ends, or having long-term goals without the energy to pursue them
Stephen Covey later developed the Eisenhower Matrix as a tool for sorting activities along these two axes, with advice for what to do in each quadrant (examples are mine):
Clearly, quadrant 2 is where we want to be: it is the place of restoration, growth, opportunity, and perspective. Quadrant 1 is important, too, but ideally the more of quadrant 2 we have, the less of quadrant 1 we face.
The difficulty with parenting, I think, is that so much of life is lived in quadrants 1 and 3, along the axis of the urgent—so much so that the line between the two can blur. When everything is relatively urgent, what is important, and what is not as important? Is it more important to hold a crying child, or help another one wipe her butt? Is it more important to get dinner prepped, or sit down and read with the kids? Medical rotations were like this too, on a different scale: is it more important to pull this JP drain or order those labs? And so on. And there is only so much delegation that can happen.
When life is lived in the axis of the urgent, there tends to be a pull towards quadrant 4. When there is respite from the world of the urgent, rather than turning to what is important, we tend to devolve into what is mindless and distracting. We may not have enough time or even energy to do anything in quadrant 2, and so we are pulled into a cycle of burnout and escape that it can be hard to get out of.
I have pretty much come to this conclusion: if I am finding myself struggling to discern relative importance, if I am becoming ineffectively anxious or overly concerned about what may not matter, then I need more of quadrant 2. I must do and schedule whatever I can to get it. There may not be an extensive amount of quadrant 2—I probably will not get as much of it during this stage of life as I’d like—but there has to be a disproportionately high degree of attention paid to getting that amount, because it’s precisely the quadrant that gets lost in my “everything is now” life.
One more thing: there is a brand of quadrant 2 that blooms up within quadrants 1 and 3. Sometimes, I’ll be doing a chore (quadrant 3) and have a sense of the holiness of that moment, the reenacting of the gospel that is happening, that elevates it into almost a time of devotion (quadrant 2). Or I’ll be debriefing a fight between the kids (quadrant 1) when the opportunity comes up to explain something very important about how we handle big emotions (quadrant 2). When I’m spending time in quadrant 2, it tends to permeate through every other quadrant. Sometimes even a quadrant 4 activity will give me an important insight I would not have had otherwise. Time in quadrant 2 also allows me to more effectively pull it into the other quadrants in unscheduled ways: I’m able to better see when it’s worth interrupting a plan for the sake of a relationship, or when something efficient gets in the way of what is actually effective. The more I’m able to break out of the world of the urgent, the better I’m able to perceive my activity within it.
