In 1967, Charles Hummel published a little booklet titled “Tyranny of the Urgent”. In it, Hummel discusses the tension between urgent things and important things —which more often won by the urgent. It means that when we must choose between urgent matters versus important matters, we tend to prioritize the former over the latter.
We do that because we think that urgent is equal with importance. What Hummel proposes is urgent matters are not necessarily important, and important things are not always urgent. If we create a matrix between urgent and not urgent in the vertical axis and important and not important in the horizontal axis, we will come up with a matrix of 4 quadrants (Q), i.e.: Q1 – urgent and important, Q2 – not urgent and important; Q3 – urgent and not important; and Q4 – not urgent and not important.
When we review our daily activities, let say for a week, in general people will find that they’ve been spending most of their time in Q1 because those are urgent and important matters. Yes, these things should be our priorities. Unfortunately, we prioritize them so much we seldom have time to do the Q2. Surprisingly, even when we think we don’t have time for Q2, we can give time to do Q3 and Q4, all to release our stress created by all the Q1 activities.
Now that we need to stay home, we have less urgent matters to attend to, and plenty of time to take care of the important things. There are some important things – that are not necessarily urgent – that we need to focus on at the moment:
- Review and Refining our Vision / Mission. Our daily busyness forced us to focus on short term issues of here and now and distract us from our long-term objectives. It is like running on a treadmill: it makes us sweaty and healthy, but not going anywhere. Revisiting our Vision and Mission regularly will help us measure how close we are to our vision. If necessary, after evaluating the progress so far and have a clearer picture of challenges and opportunities, we can refine the vision to make it more compelling for us. For leaders, we also need to revisit and re-communicate our team’s vision to our team members, to make sure that everyone is on the same chapter with us.Reviewing our vision/mission should not be a long process. It could be as simple as opening our note on our vision/goals for this year and compare it to the current progress. Keeping the current social and business conditions, do we need to refine it to make it more relevant, challenging and attainable at the same time? If we can leave it as it is for now, it is also a good thing.
- Planning. Amid the uncertainty like we have now, you probably ask: what can we plan? Winston Churchill once said, “Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” Simply said, if we are worrying about our future, that is exactly what we need to plan. First, we can plan for the short term. What to do with our task that we left in the office, plan our new daily routine at home to keep us productive, and plan for weekly and daily activity of our team. We need to have a plan if we still work from home 1, 2 or even 3 months from now. If you are a business owner, we need to have a contingency plan for at least the next 3 months.Second, we can plan, once we overcome the pandemic. What will you do if the pandemic ends by May and we can go back to the office in June? How will you achieve your annual target if the pandemic lingers even until the end of quarter 3, and we only have 3 months left to achieve our goals? Planning has its merit: it will help us regain control of our situation and give us hope.
- Clarifying Values. Distressing time is like pressing an orange. Only then we can find out the quality of the orange: is it sweet or sour? The same happens to people when they put into trials: their real self will show itself. No more façade or pretending. When it happens to you, it’s time for value clarification: is it money that is important, or family? Have we been sacrificing our health for the sake of a career? Do we have the honesty and integrity needed to be a true leader? These hard questions need to be answered honestly and truthfully, so in the end we will have solid values to cling on for the future.
- Relationships. How well do you know your team? In the office, we tend to talk only about work, even during lunchtime. We know them professionally, but we don’t know them personally. For instance, do you know where they live, how many children do they have, what is their hobby or what is their favorite food? These are simple facts that can measure how close we are with them. The more personal things we know about them, the closer we are with them. This increases their trust level to us is too. With a higher trust level, we can have more open communication and better teamwork with them.Use this downtime to call them one by one. Don’t just talk about work, but also ask about their conditions. How are they doing working from home? How is their family doing? Are they worry? Encourage them and even offer some help if you can. This is a challenging time and people tend to be more open, so it is a good opportunity to talk about life goals, dreams and values. The more we know them now, the better we will work with them later.Besides co-workers, we can also improve our relationship with our families, close friends and even our colleagues and contacts from customers and suppliers. Just look at our contact list, and think, when was the last time we have contact with them? Or we can look up our contact in our social media and drop a simple message, “Hi. How are you?” This simple gesture will encourage them and rekindle a long-lost friendship.
These are some ideas we can do to focus on Quadrant 2 during this time. We can also use our time to write articles, to exercise, improve our spiritual well being and even work on our hobby. All these activities probably have been put aside all this time due to various urgent matters. The idea is not just to keep ourselves busy, but to use our time productively and valuably.
By Joshua Siregar – Senior Trainer Dale Carnegie Indonesia
