Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important.
No — this advice isn’t good enough.
If something is urgent and important, it is called ‘firefighting.’ And firefighting destroys peace of mind.
So you should be asking: How did an important task become urgent? Did we procrastinate on it for too long? Did we not anticipate the deadline? Something went wrong — what?
Important things should ideally be done before they become urgent. Of course, some tasks inevitably show up at the last minute. But that should be a rarity.
To grow your career, here is a metric to track: What % of your time are you spending on important but non-urgent stuff? My guess is that 50-70% would be a great outcome.
Living from crisis to crisis leads to only one thing — burnout.
– Rajan