If you know the book The 7 Habits for Effective People (Book notes to follow), you will know it’s a chunky monkey. At the start of the week after a few false starts, I finally finished reading it.
Let’s talk about urgent and important:
Urgent and important tasks take your attention. For example, assembling your daughter’s wardrobe and desk over the weekend. “It wasn’t my idea.”
On the other hand, Important but not urgent tasks bounce back – however hard you try to put them off, they keep coming back. Reading the 7 Habits was one of those important but not urgent tasks. It took me over 10 years to finally read it cover to cover.
Of course, the idea is to spend most of your time working on important but not urgent tasks – it’s a choice. Writing a book, learning Spanish, taking that once-in-a-lifetime trip. None of that is urgent, but it is important, at least to you.
If fear and doubt are holding you back from what is important but not urgent, know it happens to us all, and that not all impactful tasks are sat on your to-do list.
When I wrote the Good Coach Bad Coach Manifesto I took a chance. Who was I to write it? Then again who was I not to write it.
I’ll leave you with an interview with Mike Matheny, the author of the Matheny Manifesto.