Priorities – Urgent and Important!!

With all the different demands on our time these days, we have to recognise and decide what’s urgent, important, or not important at all as things occur.

A smart way to decide urgent versus important is that urgent matters are short-term and important matters are related to long-term results.

I use the A, B, C, D process, a well-known prioritising system to assess the urgency or importance of each item or task that I have to do, as they occur each day.

Follow the four step process below to assess the urgency or importance of each item or task that you have to do each day, everything should fall into A, B, C or D category. Are you ready? Let’s go…

First Priority                                                           

A is for urgent and important items. These are things you must do, like ensuring your customer or client receives business critical information or products as agreed in the contractual agreement.

Drill down further by using the 1, 2, or 3 rating system. To decide the priority of “A items”, ask yourself, “If I can only complete one of these, which would it be?” And if two tasks are equally important assign both the same number.

Second Priority

B is for important items that are not urgent. They have long-term consequences and need to be done, but are not urgent. Like quarterly reports, team meetings, long-range planning, and relationship-building.

Assess and Analyse

C is for urgent, but not important items. These are things that can keep you from completing important task. Like, phone calls, drop-in visitors, and putting out issues that happens during the day. These can sometimes distract you, so you need to manage these carefully to ensure they don’t stop you completing the really important task/s.

Last is D

These are not urgent and not important items. They can be true time-wasters like surfing internet and idle chatting, these can be very tempting when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Remember you need to focus and spend most of your day on A’s and B’s. Ensure you prioritize “A’s” if you don’t you could get overwhelmed if you treat everything as urgent and important.