Understanding the difference between urgent and important

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] I think the first time I came across the concept of urgent versus importance was, when I read the teen version of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I believe it's written by Franklin Covey's son. Anyway, I think I was 11 or about to turn 11 when I first read it, and I understood it conceptually, but obviously in my life as an 11 year old, I didn't have much in the way of urgent versus important needs.

[00:00:56] Like I didn't really have a lot of need to differentiate between those

[00:01:00] two things. Not really at that time, probably everything that was important was also urgent for the most part.

[00:01:12] obviously, when I became a teenager, that became more of a thing maybe, but I don't think I really understood how to differentiate between the two truly until I became an adult. And this is a concept obviously from the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it's older than that because I think it comes..

[00:01:38] it does come from, or at least it is one of the places it comes from is, Eisenhower, because he has, he had this, matrix, that he used and talked about that provided you a framework for how to make decisions. And the way it goes is

[00:02:00] there's a matrix where at the top it's urgent and not urgent.

[00:02:04] And then on the side you have important and not important. And if something was urgent and important, you wanna do it now. But if something was important but not urgent, then you schedule a time for it. Then there's urgent and not important, he was the president, so obviously his answer was to delegate:

[00:02:25] How can you get this done by not being the person who does it, because it's not important enough for your own attention. and then there was not urgent and not important. So if something is not urgent and it's not important, don't do it. That is a great framework. We don't always do that. I can find myself doom scrolling on Tiktok

[00:02:46] and that's not urgent and it's also not important, but I still do it. But when it comes to most of our life, it's really important to be able to differentiate between what is urgent

[00:03:00] and what is important. And when it comes to projects and work, entrepreneurship, creating something that you don't have to create,

[00:03:15] it can be difficult to do it because it's not urgent, right? When something is urgent, we're basically reacting. We have this like external pressure to make it happen, but if something is important and not urgent, you have to rely on yourself to make it happen, and it's very easy to get distracted by the urgent

[00:03:43] which comes with outside pressures and not do the thing that is important to you. That's how you find yourself having certain values or goals or ideals. And then coming to the end of the year and realizing that you haven't been

[00:04:00] adhering to those, you haven't reached your goals, you haven't been acting according to your own values that you've said are important to you because they were important,

[00:04:10] they were not urgent.

[00:04:14] There's a post by James Clear and I'll share in the show notes, but I think that's important. It helps understand this concept. But yeah, that's what I'm thinking about today, this morning.

[00:04:32] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.