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Brian Tracy Success - Separate Urgent From Important

By: Brian Sylvan Another great success tip from Brian Tracy's Podcasts. This one comes from his "21 Great Ways To Double Your Productivity - Number 5."

The first thing to understand is that ALL of your tasks fall into one of four categories:

1. Urgent and Important Tasks

These tasks demand your immediate attention. "Work on me now!" they seem to say. Tasks in this category are phone calls and meetings. If you put them off, you'll cause serious problems.

If you're like a lot of people, you spend a lot of time working on these types of tasks. Some folks call this "putting out fires."

2. Important BUT NOT Urgent Tasks

These task are the most important to get to after the Urgent and Important tasks. Brian Tracy says that these tasks will have the greatest possible long-term consequences in your life.

These tasks include updating your business skills, personal renewal, spending time with your family, and physical fitness and exercise.

You can put these tasks off until later; but don't! Brian Tracy indicates you can change your life dramatically by working on these tasks.

Believe me, if you don't do them now, they'll become urgent sooner or later. These are things like a term paper at work; or a report for your boss.

3. Urgent but NOT Important Tasks

These are things like personal phone calls, shooting the breeze with coworkers, etc.

Brian Tracy expresses that these tasks will have no effect or negative effects on your success. This is not real work. This is busy work.

The opposite is in reality the truth. These tasks are great time-wasters. In fact, they're often great killers of careers. Don't work on tasks in this arena.

But even these aren't the biggest time-wasters. The biggest time-wasters are:

4. Neither Urgent NOR Important

Don't spend any time on these tasks. They'll produce no results for you. At work, don't read the newspaper, don't surf the internet, and don't call home to chit-chat. You'll be wasting your company's money and your time.

To summarize...

Start with the Urgent AND Important Tasks. Then go to the Important BUT NOT Urgent Tasks. Remember to stay away from all non-important work.

Finally, always ask yourself "What are the lasting consequences of completing this task?"

If the task is not important, move on to the next important task.