It’s Urgent to Care for the Important

I should be doing this, and I should be doing that. But too often, I’m not doing any of it until I have to.

I want to eat healthy, for example. What goes into my body is what comes out of it. And I have everything for salads and vegetables and nutrition. But Saturday night, pizza seems mighty good. That is until I look in the mirror or at a scale or someone says I’m not in the shape I used to be. Then I’m shocked into salads, at least until that memory recedes.

Therefore, I put myself in crisis mode and am firefighting from blaze to blaze. After something happens, I know it’s there, and I must deal with it. Before something happens, I know it’s essential, but it’s easy to ignore or put off. Then that spark becomes an inferno, and it’s again into the breach.

There’s an idiom in the pharmaceutical industry, “sell painkillers, not vitamins.” When we’re hurt or have an acute problem, we’re ready to deal with it – and spend money to do so. When a problem may exist down the road, it’s less tangible, so we’re less likely to address it. That’s even if taking vitamins ahead would be less expensive and better resolve the problem. We still wait until we have the problem to address it, despite it being more costly with worse outcomes. I skip my dental cleaning but go right away with a toothache, even if my cleaning would have prevented the cavity. Sheesh!

It’s more than healthcare: I was a test crammer. I’d avoid class and study until the night before a test in school. I knew going to class and doing the homework was good, but there would be a party with friends that night or a movie I wouldn’t want to miss. I could study later. Then, the night before an exam, I’d sit with a textbook and try to learn what a teacher had spent weeks going through. Instead of paying attention in class where I could absorb and ask about the information, I’d try to read it from a book. It was harder to learn, and I did worse on tests and grades than if I’d prioritized it.

This phenomenon reminds me of a framework applied to work, where we face similar challenges of keeping our firefighting hats on instead of fire prevention, the Eisenhower Matrix:

I’m focused on what’s outside the boxes – the scale of urgent to important. We’re fantastic at handling urgent stuff. A deadline this week or something critical today lights our wick, and we get after it. But the important elements, particularly those which aren’t urgent, are neglected.

So we’re not doing the important stuff until it becomes urgent. That’s to say, until it has become a raging fire.

How does that look in our daily life? I’ve spent half a day trying to answer an email because I wanted to get back to someone right away, recovering a file, or searching for a trivia answer. But how often have I skipped a twenty-minute run because I didn’t have time for it? Yet, that email, file, and explanation didn’t matter to me at all, and that run has an enormous impact on things I value. But I do the first because it calls for my attention and put off the latter because there’s no immediate penalty for missing today.

That’s to say, we focus on the urgent – a phone ringing, an email notification, or a customer question – at the expense of the important – time with loved ones, taking care of ourselves, or spending time on things we enjoy.

And we do that because we’re pained when we don’t do an urgent item. If you miss a deadline, how do you feel? I feel I’ve failed and that mental pain can be as hurtful as physical pain. So avoiding that gets prioritized, even at the expense of greater possible future pain – such as being unhealthy or deteriorating relationships. Because I know it stinks when a customer gets upset because I’ve taken too long to respond, but if I skip exercising or returning a family call, I’m not sure of the result.

So shift from firefighting mode – the urgent – to caretaker mode – the important. Because when we’re taking care of what matters, what is urgent matters less. And things should be easy before they have to be.