The Tyranny of the Urgent

I was thinking about why I am feeling so stressed lately---why I feel like I am on a hamster wheel running and running but not making progress.  As I was thinking about this the phrase, “The Tyranny of the Urgent” popped into my mind.  

It suddenly became clear to me what this phrase means.  The tyranny of the urgent is when things pop up in your day that appear to be “urgent” but are really not “important” to reaching your goal.

For example, I need to get the monthly budgeting done.  I sit down to work on it, but then the phone rings.  It seems urgent to pick it up, so I do, and find that it’s a phone solicitor or a friend who really doesn’t have anything of real importance to say but just wants to “shoot the breeze”.  I can either take the time for the phone call and risk not getting my budgeting done, or I can politely tell the caller that either I am not interested in what they are calling to sell me. Or, in the case of the friend, tell them I’ll call them back later.  

Other distractions to getting that budget done might be a walk to the mail box.  The mail came and I just feel like I have to get it right now.  I open it up and find something that I feel needs my attention immediately (it really wouldn’t hurt for it to wait a few hours or even a day) but I am afraid I might forget about it, so I start to take care of that item, rather than continuing on my budget.

Then there is Facebook.  Oh dear, I have notifications!  It will only take a second to see who commented on what, so I sit down to see.  I must write a comment in reply!  While I am here, I’ll just look at so and so’s profile to see what they’ve been up too lately….before I know it half an hour is shot.

Another tyranny of the urgent is knowing what to do when.  I have several projects in the hopper right now.  I have this feeling that I need to be working on all of them because they all seem urgent to me. So I spin my wheels jumping from one to the next and never completing any of them. 

And so goes the tyranny of the urgent.

It occurred to me this morning that I need to write down all my projects and if they have projected deadlines, write those down.  Then I need to order them according to deadline and priority. I need to then, pick the nearest deadline item and concentrate on it and see it to completion instead of jumping from one project to the next without any real progress happening on any.  Then I need to just work through my list in this fashion until I see things being checked off.

I need to stop letting the tyranny of the urgent/not important crowd out the important things in my life.