Some tools for figuring out what “important” means and how to get it done.
“We confess, quite apart from our sins, ‘we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’”
Charles Hummel, The Tyranny of the Urgent, 1967
Saturday Morning
It’s 7 a.m. on a Saturday. You’ve gotten up early, and you plan to study for two solid hours before the day gets going. Sitting at the kitchen table, you open your laptop to pull up the reading you have planned for the morning. You take a sip of coffee and decide that maybe you should take a look in your inbox first. An email from a coworker asks for some information. It will only take a minute to respond, and you want to be seen as helpful and hardworking.
Turning back to your reading, you hear the blip on your smartphone that lets you know there’s a new post in that Substack blog you love. The one that helps you stay up to date on that important and interesting topic that might someday advance your career . . .. You shake your head, switch your phone to silent, and turn it over so the screen is down, but not before you see a text from your sister asking if you can call her to help plan your parents’ anniversary party.
Then you hear a tiny wail from upstairs, so you run up to give your toddler a drink of water and tell her to go back to sleep for a little bit. Or maybe it’s the dog who wants to go out, or the smoke alarm starts beeping because the battery is dying or you notice that the plants are wilting and need water, or . . .. And by now, you need a bathroom break, it’s 8:30 a.m., and you’ve read three pages, of which you cannot remember a word.
Is This You?
You can decide how much exaggeration this scenario contains, but you can probably relate to at least parts of it. One reason it’s so difficult to move toward goals – in graduate school or elsewhere – is because we’re so distracted. Sometimes, we’re distracted by things that are truly important. Other times, we are pulled away by things that we don’t really need to be doing at all.
The trick – or part of it, anyway – is to figure out what we need to be doing, and then to set up systems so that we are distracted from those things as infrequently as possible. Really, that’s two tricks (almost a whole magic show). (1) What should you be doing? And (2) How can you avoid being distracted? This post is going to focus mostly on number 1 – how to determine priorities.
What Should You Be Doing?
An article I scanned while researching the topic of priorities reported the efforts of two academics to implement the Eisenhower Matrix (about which more in a moment) with some Iraqi government officials. The authors began the statement of their research problem with the words: “Baghdad governorate suffers from the difficulty of distinguishing between urgent and non-urgent tasks” (Ghanem & Al-Rubaiayi, 2022). Baghdad governorate, we are right there with you.
The Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix, which is attributed to former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and was popularized by Steven Covey in his bestselling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a tool that can help us determine priorities. The matrix is a 2×2 grid set up with urgency along the horizontal axis and importance along the vertical. Since the words I just typed don’t make any sense to me either, I will provide an illustration.
One can define “urgent” and “important” in different ways. Because this post is part of a series on goals and motivation, we’re going to define “important” as something that moves you toward your goals. (Not sure about your goals? Check out this post on reflection and goal setting and this one on honing your goals.) “Urgent” we will define as something that has a relatively proximate deadline. That is, it needs to be done soon.
A Break for Interactivity
This brings us to the interactive part of this post. Before we move on, take a moment, and think (or write if you are in a place where you can do that) about some things that you spent more than 30 minutes doing over the past week. Try to think of maybe 10 or so different things, and they need not be academic.
Here’s my list:
- Running
- Writing blog post
- Selecting readings for narrative argument assignment
- Attending new faculty orientation
- Taking a prayer walk
- Reading and answering email
- Updating ENGL 101 syllabus
- Reading article on engagement-based contract grading
- Reading books on FaceTime with my 2-year-old granddaughter
- Baking cookies
- Watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Once you have your own list ready, use the definitions of “urgent” and “important” from a few paragraphs ago to identify which quadrant each activity falls into. Remember, “important” means it moves you toward your goal. So, looking at our scenario from the first paragraph, by this definition, the dog who needs to go out and the toddler who needs a drink are not important, because your goal for the morning was to complete two hours of studying. I promise we’ll get back to this problem – because it is a real problem.
Using the Matrix to Determine Priorities
Looking at your activities through this lens can help you see which activities over the past few days have moved you toward your goals. These are the important activities – the ones that should be prioritized.
The matrix can also help you see whether you spend most of your time in activities that move you toward your goals. The real strength of the matrix, however, is the advice that comes with it on where to place your highest priority. It turns out that the most successful people spend the most time and energy in Quadrant 2, focusing on activities that are important, but not urgent.
To me, this is counterintuitive. If an activity is important, I need to do it. If it is urgent, it needs to be done right away. If I have a presentation at 8 a.m. Monday and a 50-page paper due in three weeks, I am certainly going to focus my attention on the presentation. The problem is that if we live in Quadrant 1, we are living in a constant state of stress and not doing our best work. Furthermore, we are very likely neglecting longer-term projects that might be more important for reaching our goals.
A Bias Toward the Urgent
It turns out that we humans have a bias toward the urgent. Zhu et al. (2018) conducted experiments demonstrating that, confronted with a choice between a task with a tight deadline and a task with no deadline or one that is farther away, people tend to choose the task with the tighter deadline. This can happen even when the less urgent tasks clearly have a bigger payoff. In grad school terms, this is like choosing to work on a small, low-stakes presentation that’s due Monday instead of reading those three articles in German for your thesis.
“Mere Urgency”
You might say, well, that’s because people want to get the urgent tasks out of the way so they can focus on the more important tasks without distraction. Or maybe it is because the urgent tasks take less time or effort. In real life, those explanations are probably true some of the time. But they don’t explain everything. Zhu and colleagues, in fact, controlled for those explanations and still found that when urgency was added to a task description, participants were more likely to choose “objectively worse options over objectively better options.” They call this “the mere urgency effect,” and point out that it leads people to make decisions that are not necessarily rational – if we assume that “rational” means doing what will produce the biggest payoff for our efforts.
A reason for “the mere urgency effect” may be, the authors explain, that when something is limited or restricted, it captures our attention. A deadline restricts the time we have to do something, making it seem important. They also found that when people are busy – or think of themselves as busy – they are even more likely to choose tasks with time limits and smaller rewards over tasks with no time limits and larger rewards. So beware, busy grad student, lest you succumb to what Charles E. Hummel called, “the tyranny of the urgent.”
The Tyranny of the Urgent
Hummel was director of faculty ministries for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and president of Barrington College in Rhode Island. He also wrote something like 15 books, so he knew a thing or two about getting stuff done. In his 1967 booklet, The Tyranny of the Urgent, he recalls a conversation with a cotton mill manager. (As an aside, I know nothing about managing a cotton mill, but it’s probably a busy job.) The manager told Hummel, “Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”
So here is our problem. Urgent things scream at us to do them now. There is something inside us that gains pleasure from completing urgent tasks. Life is full of tasks that are, in terms of the Eisenhower Matrix, not important and urgent, but also ones that are important and urgent. But we’d probably move toward our goals more efficiently if we spent more time on the important and not urgent tasks, which we can never get to because of all the fires.
The Importance of Planning
Hummel’s advice for those in his organization was to block out time each morning, each week, and each month to “prayerfully take inventory and plan.” He quotes a company president who applied this advice to business, saying that “One minute spent in planning saves three or four minutes in execution.”
How to Plan: Some Practical Tips
To apply Hummel’s advice to graduate studies, set aside ten minutes each morning, one hour each week, and maybe a few hours (Hummel recommends a whole day) each month for evaluation, prioritization, and planning.
Ten Minutes Each Morning
Look at your to-do list, your schedule, and anywhere else you might jot down ideas or tasks. Make a quick list of items in priority order, and plan when you’ll do each one. I just learned about a great little system for this that I will share next week.
One Hour Each Week
Hummel suggests Friday afternoon for taking stock of the week’s progress and considering what needs to be done in the following week. I usually do this on Sunday afternoon. Monday morning might work too. But at some point between weeks, take an hour to evaluate the previous week, set some priorities for the upcoming week, see what is coming up, and make a plan.
A Day(?) Each Month
This seems ambitious to me (and to be fair, Hummel does write, “Often, you will fail.”). But try to set aside at least a half-day each semester for in-depth evaluation and planning. This comports well with the reflection and goal-setting activities I suggest here. If anyone reading this has experience with using most of a day each month for this kind of activity, please let me know – I would love to hear how it works!
How to Handle the Rest of the Matrix
We’ve spent a lot of time on Quadrant 2. These are the things you want to make sure to plan, so that you have time for them. What about the other quadrants?
Quadrant 1
If it is both important and urgent, obviously you need to do it. If you focus on prioritization and planning, however, fewer things should fall into this category. That’s because you’ll be accomplishing important things before they become urgent.
Quadrant 4
Not important and not urgent. These are things like playing the Wordle, catching up on the latest Instagram posts, or reading about a new restaurant. Sometimes, these things can be relaxing, and they are not always a bad idea. But make sure to evaluate whether these activities really are helping to recharge you. If so, confine them to a defined time so that they don’t take over your life.
Quadrant 3
Not important and urgent. I saved this for last because I think it is the most difficult to manage. This quadrant often includes other people’s priorities. The email from the coworker. The text from your sister. The dog who needs to go out. The toddler who wants water.
Quadrant 3 takes some wisdom to navigate. It is not bad to want to be helpful. We need to maintain relationships. And someone has to take the dog out and comfort the toddler. Kennedy (2022), a professor who understands the academic world (and whose article pointed me to Zhu’s work) also notes that professionally as well as personally, we are more interdependent than the matrix might suggest. Some of those “not important” things actually are important, just not in the context of this particular goal.
If you Google the Eisenhower Matrix, you’ll often see Quadrant 3 labeled “delegate.” That is good advice, but because none of us is the CEO in every area of our life, the directive to simply delegate Quadrant 3 tasks is not all that helpful. Instead, I suggest planning and communication. If you need to set aside two hours on a Saturday morning to study, do some prework to protect that time. Negotiate with your spouse to be in charge of the dog and toddler during that time. Let coworkers and family know beforehand that you will not answer emails and texts before noon on Saturday. If you notice something like wilting plants or remember something else you must do today, write it down and give it a specific time.
Widening the Focus
This post is focused on academic priorities. Of course, you also have priorities in other parts of your life, and sometimes these may seem to conflict with academics. One reason to protect your study time is so that it doesn’t leach into other important parts of your life. That is an important part of what it means to move toward integration.
Planning ahead to deal with Quadrant 3 can be challenging. Depending on your life circumstances, it may seem impossible. And of course, we all know from experience that Robert Burns is right about what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men. However, taking time to prioritize, plan, and communicate is worth the effort and will, over time, yield good fruit.
Shameless Plug
If you would like help with managing your priorities or any other aspect of life in graduate school, sign up for a free consultation to discuss whether academic coaching might make sense for you.
References
Ghanem, A.A.K., & Al – Rubaiayi, S.A.M. (2022). The possibility of applying the task priority matrix (Applied study In Baghdad Governorate). Journal of Positive School Psychology, 6(9), 3289–3305.
Hummel, C. (1967). The tyranny of the urgent. InterVarsity Press.
Kennedy, D.R., & Porter, A.L. (2022). The illusion of urgency. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 86(7), 806–808.
Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C.K. (2018). The mere urgency effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3).
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