Use Deadlines & the Eisenhower Matrix to Make Long-Term Goals Accessible Today

By Caba Kosmotesto for the Noun Project

There’s a difference between a task or project being “urgent” and it being “important.” Urgent things have to be done immediately; like returning a critical email, handling a top client request, or meeting a deadline. Important things, on the other hand, contribute to a long-term goal. For example, the book you’ve always wanted to write or the website you’ve long thought about launching are important, not urgent.

In the quest for meaningful work, it’s important (so to speak) to distinguish between urgency and importance. If you’re forever bogged down by must-do’s to the detriment of would-like-to-do’s, you’ll have little hope of accomplishing what consumes your daydreams. As Mattan Griffel, founder and CEO of The Front Labs, writes on The Next Web, it’s within your power to make important tasks seem more urgent than they are, simply by the order in which you prioritize them.

The easiest way to make an important task urgent, and make sure it gets done, is to give it a deadline. Deadlines are actually what makes urgent tasks urgent: the fact that you have to deal with them immediately. A lack of deadlines is also often what makes important tasks so unimportant. They’re usually the kind of thing that you can get to eventually….

One way to make a deadline more serious is to state it publicly. When you’re publicly accountable to a deadline, then you can’t fool just yourself…. Another way to make a deadline more serious is to set up a reward for hitting a deadline and/or punishment for not hitting the deadline…. It’s very easy to ignore a deadline unless you have a constant reminder. Urgent tasks often have reminders built-in, like your friend or spouse who keeps bugging you to do something.

These days, we’re beholden to our calendars and inboxes as technological tools that structure our days. Being as time-strapped as we are (whether that pressure is self-created or not), we’d be lost without these organizational mechanisms. Very little beyond the planned agenda or lengthy list of to-do’s ever gets done.

To combat the issue, try out the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a quadrant that asks you to plot out what on your plate is important vs. not important, and what’s urgent vs. not urgent. The quadrant that contains “Not Urgent but Important Tasks” is your sweet spot. Only if you make an important project inescapable in your daily productivity routine will you make headway on it.

As Picasso put it, “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

[via]

via 99u http://ift.tt/1g4sw04