Mindset Monday - Urgent vs Important

This is episode 128 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now, your host, vitality and peak performance coach, Kari Schneider.

Okay, here we go. It is Mindset Monday. Another Monday in the books. Here we go. It's one of those things that.

But it seems like these Mondays keep.

Sneaking up on us faster and faster. With so many things that we juggle in our lives, the question becomes, where should I spend my time? Where should I focus my time? How do I decide what gets my attention? And that brings us to today's topic, and it's called urgent versus important. And with this topic, I think I've talked about it so much lately because.

It'S been one of our topics on our power ups, not only in our team group coaching, but also our reset programs. And we usually are talking about it for just about five minutes first thing in the morning so that people can set the intention for the day of distinguishing between the tasks that are urgent versus the things that are really important in their lives. And I'm just going to expand on it just a tiny bit today so that you have clarity and so you can be very deliberate in how you focus your time. And hopefully, while you're listening to this podcast, it's during what I would call net time.

I learned this from Tony Robbins.

And net time, it's net, and that stands for no extra time. So what I do when I listen to my podcasts, not my personal podcast.

But the ones that I consume from.

Different thought leaders, I do it when.

I'm on a walk or when I'm exercising or when I'm driving in the car. Those are the times that I listen to podcasts. And it's because it's not costing me any extra time in my day. It's during a time that I would traditionally be just doing something that. That is folding laundry or on a treadmill or driving in a car, something that doesn't require my attention, but I can consume a podcast. So hopefully you're doing this during a net time activity, and that will allow you to not use any extra time because of our topic today, which is urgent versus Important. And the way this came into my attention years and years ago, almost two decades ago, is through the book called the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And this book was, you know, it was already several years old and so ahead of its time and very specific in trying to blend these highly effective habits for people in work, in business, in family, and how they really could juggle it all and be extremely effective in their results and their outcomes. So the concept of urgent versus important I first, first read in that book. So that was almost two decades ago. And now because my life has changed so much in that time, I find it so incredibly valuable. So between business launches or running a gym or a busy household with seven family members, or trying to juggle my own personal health or my performance or racing or fitness, there's so much that has come at me for so many years that there's so many times I've completely fallen on my face because I've been taking on too many of the things that have been urged urgent and not emphasizing and prioritizing with the things that are truly important, which are my health, my family, my overall mission and purpose in life. And in doing so, this distinguishing between urgent and important and being deliberate about understanding it, and being very clear about it can be extremely useful. So you don't find yourself caught up in answering every single demand and every single thing that's coming at you. So I'm going to give you a simple way to take a look at this. And if you do have a pen and paper and you do draw this out, the visual is very powerful. And the visual is simply a grid. And it's a grid that has four spots on the grid. And on the top is urgent, and on the bottom is important. And on the top with urgent, there's. There's low urgency and high urgency. So those would be the two spots up top. And on the side with important, there would be low importance and high importance. And we're going to start with the top left corner. This would be high urgency and high importance. And I'm going to go through three different segments in each one of these being an example of what this looks like, the results that tend to happen in this kind of quadrant and the strategy that you can use to manage this, this area when there's something that's high importance and high urgency. So something that's important and urgent, really high on both of those areas is typically a problem or something that is really, it could be a catastrophe, it could be a burning house fire, any of those things. And it's something that typically causes a.

Fair bit of stress. So think exams in university or high school, think playoffs in sport, think a really big work deadline. Think an emergency with your child that has a broken limb or has to go to the hospital. And the results in those situations, the results are typically stress crisis management and if it endures for a longer period of time, you're often looking at some level of burnout because it's so. It's such a high drive. And really your sympathetic nervous system is driving everything. You can't manage this for a long period of time. So your results end up being really, really problematic if it does endure for a long time. The strategy in this situation is you just have to deal with it in the moment. Because this is the thing that is really pertinent to stop and do this thing. It's the house fire, it's the child emergency. It's the thing that really has a hard deadline. So you just have to stop and do it. But you have to make sure that whatever it is that's falling into this highly important and urgent category doesn't last forever and ever. Think in terms of exams. Students cannot handle the stress of exams.

Day in and day out indefinitely.

Same thing with playoffs, they don't go that level indefinitely. Or a house fire, it just. You can't deal with those every single day without a break. So that's the kind of thing that cannot be sustained. And that's why you deal with a thing in the moment. You have to take action on it. And you make sure that this isn't the type of thing that falls into this category on the regular basis. The next one, we're going counterclockwise, so we're going down on the importance. This means that we're in high urgent right now, but low importance. The examples of this would be when people are coming at you in some form or another. It might be phone calls coming in, some emails that are coming in, but it typically revolves around someone else's deadline. Someone else needs something from you, it might be very important or urgent for them, but for you, it's simply not high on your importance. But because something or someone is coming at you, it feels highly urgent at the time, or someone's asking you for an answer right away. So your results in these situations, you tend to have distraction from what really matters to you. And you also tend to feel out of control because it's not something that's within your realm. And your strategy for this is really to delegate, delegate to someone else or delegate to another time. So you push the time to a different spot. The next on this quadrant is the going counterclockwise. We're now on the low importance and the low urgent. So both of them are low. The examples of these we see probably every day, especially through pandemic times, that there might be More of some of the things that are low importance and low urgency. Things like social media or maybe organizing your kitchen drawer, organizing those old bills that you wanted to make sure they were in the right files from last year or tv watching all of those would be low importance, low urgence. But the results that come from it are time wasting. The results in a work environment might be loss of your job or a loss of focus. So there are things that really take you away from what really matters to you in life. And your strategy in this is not to do it, not to have it take up a big chunk of your time. This, this isn't something that you want to delegate a lot of time to. And our next quadrant, our last quadrant is really the spot that we want to have the most of our time, the most of our life spent. And this is areas of low urgency but high importance. And examples of this would be our exercise, our health emphasis, our friend and family connection, maybe a major project that we're building or we're working on that is within our life's purpose or mission. And these are the things that are really the bigger drivers in our lives. And the results that come from staying in this quadrant are the vision and the growth. You're able to see forward, see into the future and plan for that. There's improvement in whatever area that you're working on in that important zone. So maybe improvement in your relationship connection, maybe improvement in your overall health or the direction you're going with your purpose or mission, or the project you're working on. Even if you're going for something like the Olympics, you know that this is, you're on your way when you're aiming at a world championships and you're doing all the things to emphasize what's needed for that. And your strategy in order to really see this happen and come to fruition is to plan, plan for these big things, plan for these important things that are non urgent and actually schedule it, actually put them in your schedule. And that's the thing that often gets set aside is forgetting to schedule that thing that emphasizes your health, forgetting to schedule that connection time that's just for that special person in your life, or forgetting to block out the time that you know that needs to be there for creation of whatever that big thing is. And these are these main quadrants in urgent versus important. All I did here was take those.

Quadrants that Stephen Covey had developed and just elaborate on them a little bit more. I want people to be able to visualize them within our own lives. The way Stephen Covey had it out was really primarily into a work scenario and a business scenario. And what's happened in our lives is so pervasive into all the areas our health permeates into our family, which goes into our work and our mission. And it all ends up being part of our life. And that's why I wanted to elaborate on examples, the results that come if we stay in that context, if we stay in that quadrant too long and, and the strategies and how we deal with it, but for the bigger purpose of having, having all of us to have greater clarity and be very deliberate on what we designate as urgent and what we designate as important and realizing that we're not simply going to jump at every urgent call. There's going to be some that we have to jump at. It's an urgent, important one that's high on both of those. But we're not, we're simply not going to jump at every email, jump at every phone call, jump at every request because it may not have anything to do with our main priority, the things that are the most important in our lives. So that's the distinction for this Mindset Monday. I hope this serves you. I wanted to elaborate on it more because I know it has really served some of the people in our reset and a few people have seen major life changes just on the day to day from the little distinction of looking at anything that's happening in that day and deciding, hey, wait a second, no, it's more important that I go for a walk in nature with my family and not deal with this other thing right now that would have gotten in the way of that most priority driven, important thing in the life called family. So I hope this serves you today. Have a beautiful rest of your week. Happy Monday and keep doing what you do. Keep being your best so you can give your best.

If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team podcast, you'll love being on the team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To join, email us@info powerconditioning.com with subject line team. That's info powerconditioning.com we can't wait for you to be on the team.