It’s Sunday, 27 October 2024, 11:00 AM here in India. India is gearing up to head into the Festival of Lights, Deepavali or Diwali later this week. Happy Deepavali to you if you celebrate! May this festival bring lights of joy, hope, gratitude and blessings to all of you.
Last week, the newsletter had a broken link to Name It, Tame It: Understanding Distractions to Manage Them Effectively. This link should take you to the article. My apologies for the broken link 🙂 And thank you for being patient with me.
P.S. I have just noticed that the previous newsletter had a broken link too. I am so sorry about you having to click broken links!
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President, United States of America.
Solving problems gives us an adrenaline rush. Earlier in my career, I thought I wasn’t adding value to my role if I wasn’t solving problems. If I wasn’t putting out fires, I would get bored and worry that I might be fired in the next round of layoffs.
This shaped the first decade of my career in the corporate world. My main job was putting out fires, solving problems, and dealing with urgent and out-of-hand conflicts and issues. I spent 80% of the day on urgent things, which became challenging when I moved into management and leadership roles in the second decade.
I was so addicted to firefighting that important things like planning, strategizing, and reflecting took a backseat.
If there was a deadline for delivering the plan or strategy to stakeholders, then it would get done.
But without a deadline or external accountability, the important things always ranked at the bottom of my priority list.
Dwight Eisenhower was a five-star general during World War II and the 34th President of the United States of America. He navigated his country through Cold War tensions and led America to post-war prosperity.
Eisenhower always had urgent matters to handle as President: Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, navigating the space race’s early days, enforcing school desegregation, and ending the Korean War.
Eisenhower also made time for strategic things.
He developed the Eisenhower Doctrine, which pledged US military support to Middle Eastern countries resisting communism. He championed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which transformed American infrastructure, commerce, and travel by creating the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since 1957.
You might wonder why I am giving you a history lesson on Eisenhower.
Every work has urgent and important components. The important stuff is never time-sensitive or critical.
If our work prioritisation defaults to handling urgent and time-sensitive things every day, then the strategic things won’t get done. When reactive things take priority, the strategic things are swept out of sight.
Take an inventory of the tasks and work you do every day. How are you prioritising them now? Are they ranked by urgency or importance?
