I was inspired this week by my Holstee subscription and their theme this month of “Simplicity”. In the activity guide, there was a prompt asking: “At the end of the day, how often do you feel accomplished and at ease?” In many of our lives, there is always more to be done. No matter how much we accomplish in a given day, we rarely respond to all the emails, calls, social obligations, fill our need to exercise, get enough sleep, eat healthy, and take care of all of our family responsibilities.

Leo Babauta wrote; “The problem isn’t that we have too little time - we all get the same amount of time each day and each week. It’s the exact right amount of time, because it’s all there is. It’s possible that we have too many things to do. But actually the real problem is that we want to do too much in the time we have.”

I have found that it can be very difficult to differentiate between the “urgent” and the “important”. The fact that something needs to be done right away, presents the illusion that it is automatically more important than whatever else you were working on. Those urgent tasks add to the list of things we want to get done and they get in the way of us doing meaningful work. Multitasking and checking things off a list gives us a shot of dopamine that provides us a sense of accomplishment, however the result is that we feel busy, yet not very productive. It’s like eating a candy bar that gives you a rush of sugar, only to make you crash later on. On the other hand, the most important and meaningful work usually doesn’t come with deadlines. Think about learning something new, training a team member, exercising, reorganizing, improving processes or scheduling preventative maintenance. These things can be critical, yet too often we tell ourselves we’ll get to those things when we have time, once we’ve done all the other things on our to-do list because we aren’t pressed by a looming deadline.

I know this is a constant struggle of me, my team, and leaders around the country. To keep the focus on the most critical tasks we need to work on, I encouraged our team to do three things (that I too, am working on).

1. Keep the big picture in mind. When we are aware of what we are working toward, we can see beyond all of the minutia that is right in front of us, weighing us down. The motivation to accomplish something great can help to overcome the stress that creeps in from unfinished and unimportant tasks.

2. Schedule important tasks first. If I do my “MITs” (most important tasks) early in the day, the chance of that getting disrupted by urgent things is reduced greatly. I know companies that have a “no email from 9-10am” rule to help team members start their day by my making progress on important projects.

3. Prioritize tasks that reduce the frequency of urgent tasks. We all know when something needs to get done, it’s faster to do it ourselves than train someone else, right? This is true in the short term, but making time to set yourself up for success long term will pay dividends and allow you more time in the future to focus on meaningful work. The same is true for setting up proper organizational systems, creating more efficient processes and outsourcing certain tasks.

I hope you find them helpful and are inspired to focus on the “important” and not the “urgent”.