How many #1 Priorities Do You Have?

I once read a story about a lady who walked along a river and saw someone drowning. The lady immediately jumped into the river, saved the drowning person, and just as she was done with CPR, she saw another person drowning. She jumped back into the river and saved this second drowning person. And, yes, as you may have guessed, just as she was down administering CPR to the second person, she saw yet another person drowning. And, yes, she jumped back into the river, and saved the third person. The question posed was at what point should she walk up the river and see what’s causing so many people to drown in the river? Perhaps there’s a broken fence up the river, and if only that was fixed, no more folks would be at risk of falling into the river?

This story stayed with me over the years, maybe because I shared it often at work. Yes, saving people from drowning is urgent and important, and should be prioritized, and, fortunately, often is. Fixing the broken fence is important, and should be prioritized, but often is not. I’d argue it’s urgent, strategically urgent. I was told it was important, but not urgent. That may explain why those types of activities are so rarely prioritized …

I’ve often noticed that there is a strange gravitational force that pulls us to the lower left quadrant in that familiar urgent/important matrix that we have to the left. How can that be, you ask? How is it possible that we wouldn’t spend the majority of our time on the urgent and the important?

I’ll sheepishly admit that I’ve spent more than my fair share in the “not urgent and not important” category. You know, along the lines of the TPS report… And if you’re fortunate enough to not know what a TPS report is, it’s from Office Space, a report you must fill out of little to no consequence to the universe. And if it wasn’t a TPS report then it was fixing a broken process and finding the futility of fighting a senseless bureaucracy in the spectacular Better Off Ted: 2 minutes very well spent watching this clip to the right:

How often have I fallen captive to the temptation of responding to an email, getting a positive reinforcement from feeling I’ve accomplished something in responding to an email that didn’t really matter in the first place, and then getting an additional positive reinforcement from the correspondent, a thanks, which of course I responded to for a third boost of positive reinforcement?

I know I should be careful and deliberate about how I spend my time, how I prioritize the minutes and hours that tick away, and yet the gravity of the lower left hand quadrant is strong. And the allure of completing small, even if not important and not urgent tasks makes it stronger still.

How do you go about choosing your priorities? How many top priorities do you have? What helps you focus on what truly matters?

More thoughts on priorities, and an explanation of the title of the post on Heart of the Matter.