The Urgent vs. the Important

One of the things I have found most challenging about my new job as a high school secretary is the sheer busy-ness of the job. I admit that it is more challenging right now at the beginning of the year when I am new and several hundred students are purchasing parking passes so they can park on campus. This particular season will pass, only to be followed by other major projects, but the parking pass procession is particularly difficult.

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You see, at various times of the day, I will have a couple dozen students lined up in front of my desk, all wanting to get their parking pass before security starts issuing parking fines. Plenty of urgent business.

Yet at the same time, I need to keep up with the more weighty issues of student discipline that the assistant principal for whom I work needs to deal with. She sends me emails to let me know what tasks I need to do next. Today, I missed noticing several of these important emails until too late. It is so easy to get focused on the urgent, and miss the important.

This focus on the urgent - the tyranny of the urgent as Charles E. Hummel puts it - tends to plague the best of us. We allow the things that are right in front of us to take our full attention. In the meantime, we allow more important things to slip past our attention simply because they don't clamor as loudly for our attention.

I can take steps to fix the problem of not seeing my boss's important emails until much later by setting an alert whenever a message from her comes into my mailbox. It is much more difficult to ensure that the "tyranny of the urgent" does not crowd out the truly important things in our lives.

What will I do to make sure THAT doesn't happen? What about you?