The difference between urgency and importance

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Are you constantly besieged with emergencies and don't know how to dig yourself out?

If so, I'll give you some insight as to how bring some sanity to your situation OR allow you to make a determination that your situation is in need of change. I'm borrowing some time management ideas from here as well as inspiration from a co-worker.

First, some clarification:

Importance refers to how much something will help you attain your personal or professional goals. So, for example, if you want to become a great guitar player, it would be important to acquire a guitar. It's very important to take an evaluation of all the tasks, commitments, and issues you are dealing with and determine how important they are. In the link above, it is a binary determination, something is either important... or it is not important. The simplicity of this formula has a certain appeal and to start with, I'd highly recommend it. An important additional note about importance is to use this factor as a determination of how much time you spend doing something. If it is important for you to be the best guitar player in the world... you shouldn't spend a lot of time doing other things, especially if you've decided those things are NOT important.

Urgency refers to how time sensitive some happens to be. Getting out of the way of a runaway truck is an urgent issue. Acquiring the guitar in the above situation is likely to become urgent if you are on your way to your guitar lesson and the instructor doesn't have a guitar for you to borrow. An important note on this regard is that the urgency of issues can often change due to outside forces, but the importance is relatively stable.

Now to the free advice (and worth every penny I'm sure):
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