A number of years ago I was introduced to a daily blog entitled “Leadership Freak.” The author, Dan Rockwell’s tag line is, “Empowering leaders 300 words at a time.” I’ve shared the link to many of my colleagues, as well as to former students of graduate classes who I taught. When time is tight, which it always seems to be for leaders, it is welcomed to gain some great insights in this 3 minute read.
Earlier this week, Dan wrote the following blog: The Urgency Illusion: Are You Running Around With Your Hair On Fire? Here’s Why? The premise of the blog was understanding the difference between important and urgent in relationship to tasks. While distinguishing between important and urgent is essential in the world of leadership, it has great parallels in many aspects of life as well. Point in case, I referenced the visual below in a faith presentation I did earlier this week.
Everyone moves through these quadrants during different times of the day or week. From my perspective, if you stay in the first quadrant very long, you are in crisis mode and headed toward burnout. If everything is important and urgent, then you are not likely managing your priorities well or not allowing your team members to be involved in tasks. Successful leaders try not to spend an inordinate amount of time in Quadrant #1. They also don’t live in the fourth quadrant often, as it is neither healthy nor productive.
However, for the purpose of this blog post, focusing on Quadrant #2 is my main topic. Scheduling the important needs to be almost non-negotiable for leaders. Without that commitment, urgent takes over and not only do your priorities slide away but your organization sees a detour in what you deem as important.
What is important in your words must be followed by what is important in your actions.
As a Superintendent of Schools, I believed that being visible in schools and the work of instructional leadership were important. Meetings in my world had the potential to consume my days if I didn’t block off time to get out of the office and into our schools. I wouldn’t say that my schedule was inflexible, but it was important to me that once I provided it weekly to trustees, school and system administration, only major emergencies could derail it. It was seldom urgent to get into a school but it was always important! My scheduling of the important also provided role modeling for my colleague administrators and mostly eliminated the excuse, “I don’t have time!”
Any task, that you deem important must be scheduled or it gets lost quite quickly in the busyness of the day. Quiet time, prayer time, getting exercise, going to church or even spending time with a loved one needs to be scheduled, especially if you are a busy person.
Emergencies and crisis come up, but it is not sustainable to be constantly putting out fires. Leaders and ultimately everyone needs to ensure they know what is important in their lives and jobs and then schedule around those priorities. Commit whenever possible to living in Quadrant #2 and enjoy your important schedule!
