Are You Busy, or Are You Making Progress?
You can spend all day solving problems, answering emails, and meeting deadlines. At the end of the day, you can still feel that you did not make real progress.
Sometimes, this creates a feeling of emptiness. At other times, being busy gives you a false sense of achievement. This happens because activity is not the same as progress. You can complete many tasks without making progress on the things that are most important.
We sometimes call the discomfort that follows this experience “imposter syndrome.” But doubt about your ability is not always the cause. Sometimes, the discomfort comes from knowing that your actions do not show your full ability. You know that you can do more important work.
Then the next day begins, and you repeat the same pattern.
This is not always a problem. Life and work include responsibilities. Some problems require an immediate response. Some emails must be answered quickly. Some deadlines cannot move.
The important question is this: Are you being effective, or are you only being responsive?
Urgency Can Control Your Decisions
Urgent tasks can make decisions for us.
When something appears to need immediate attention, we usually respond to it. We do not always stop to ask if the task is also important.
Urgency can also make us feel safe. An urgent task gives us a clear reason to act. We do not have to think carefully about why we are doing it. We can simply say, “It needs to be done now.”
Before you act, ask why the task feels urgent.
Maybe you feel responsible for it. Maybe you do not want to disappoint someone. Maybe you are afraid of what will happen if you do not complete it. Maybe you simply enjoy the satisfaction of finishing a task.
There can also be a more difficult reason. You might be using an urgent task to avoid a more important decision.
Understand What Your Habits Give You
Our habits often satisfy needs that we do not fully recognize.
For example, being needed can make us feel valuable. This can cause us to focus on small tasks because other people depend on us to complete them. We can then start to treat these tasks as priorities.
We can also create unnecessary dependence. When we repeatedly solve problems for other people, they can learn to depend on us. We can mistake this dependence for productivity.
The reverse can also happen. We can become dependent on other people. Instead of making a decision, we ask someone else what to do.
Both behaviors can keep us busy. Neither behavior necessarily creates progress.
Control can also make us feel secure. As a result, we can continue behaviors that make us comfortable even when those behaviors prevent progress.
Important Work Is Easy to Delay
Urgent tasks often take time away from important priorities.
You postpone an important conversation until next week. You delay training because today’s work seems more urgent. You ignore your health because you believe you will take care of it when you have more time.
Nothing immediately goes wrong, so the delay seems acceptable.
But the effect can appear later.
A manager can ask why you did not complete the important work. A friend can tell you that they are moving away after you repeatedly postponed spending time together. A doctor can tell you that you ignored a health problem for too long.
An ignored priority does not disappear because there is no immediate consequence.
Priorities Can Be Uncomfortable
Most people understand that important work should have priority over work that only feels urgent. The difficult part is acting on that knowledge.
Priorities can require you to set limits for yourself and other people. You might have to give up some control. You might disappoint someone. You might have to accept that you avoided an important responsibility.
You might also discover that an urgent problem is not your problem to solve.
This is why urgent tasks can be easier than important tasks. We usually know what is important. But important work often requires more thought, discipline, and emotional effort than the task directly in front of us.
Examine the Pattern
The solution is not to ignore urgent problems or become less responsive.
Some urgent decisions are correct. A delayed priority does not always mean that you are avoiding responsibility.
The problem begins when your decisions become automatic.
Stop and examine what causes you to make a choice. You probably already know which tasks are urgent and which tasks are important. You probably also know which type of task usually gets your attention.
The more useful question is: Why do you continue to choose the urgent task, and what do you get from that choice?
Your repeated decisions become habits. Those habits affect your career, your relationships, and your life.
For this reason, asking whether you have enough time for your priorities might not be the best question. A better question is whether your urgent tasks give you something that makes you continue to choose them.
And this leads to the most important question: If your days are full of small, repeated tasks, what are you creating for your future?
