How do you balance both the urgent AND the important?

How do you do all that needs to be done on a daily basis while still keeping an eye on the BIG stuff that lays ahead?

It’s so easy to get stuck in the minutia of today. It doesn’t feel like minutia. It often feels like deadlines and fires to put out. It feels like an overflowing inbox and requests for tasks that will move other projects forward.

The BIG stuff ahead? That often seems like it has abundant time to accomplish it. It falls in that never accomplished category that Eisenhower identified as important but not urgent.

So how do you do both the urgent and the important and stay sane?
In a client session yesterday, I went over just this process. It requires a system to address each both the urgent (the daily stuff that has to get done) plus the important (the big stuff that continues to get put off).
For the daily stuff, having a checklist of the minimum that MUST be accomplished to complete your day is a huge help.

Cat Stancik, Lead Boss, identifies this as your ‘Minimum Viable Day’. It could be that you must send 1 prospecting email, make 1 social media post and take 1 item off your to-do list. I like Laura Reis of Crux Organizing’s explanation, it’s your plan for the day if you were to hit every ‘red light’.

For the BIG stuff, select 4 areas that you want to move forward on in a month (only 4 and 1 MUST be non-business related). Keep this list with you and review daily. Select one 15 minute task you could complete on at least 1 of those 4 big things on a daily basis. This keeps the ball in motion and helps you to gather momentum.

I’d love to hear, how do you keep the balance between the urgent and the important?

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