How to keep up with the most important things and not waste your time

Important matters are our long-term projects and goals. For example, a book we want to write or a company we dream of starting. We are constantly distracted from this by urgent matters: calls, meetings, appointments, e-mail - everything that needs to be responded to immediately. How can you stop wasting all your time on such things?

Determine what's important to you

The important is rarely urgent, and the urgent is rarely important.

Dwight D. Eisenhower 34th President of the United States

Use the Eisenhower Matrix to determine what matters most to you. This method divides your tasks into four categories.

The upper left quadrant is important and urgent. This includes all kinds of problems, contingencies, and deadlines.
The upper right quadrant is important but not urgent. This can include relationships, long-term project planning, and recreation.
The lower left quadrant is unimportant, but urgent. These are meetings, calls and other similar activities.
The lower right quadrant is unimportant and non-urgent. This category includes useless activities that take up time, entertainment, and other small things.

It is clear that important urgent matters need to be dealt with first. Then - to reduce the number of unimportant and non-urgent matters. Difficulties arise when we try to categorize cases from the two remaining categories.

Most people always try to get rid of the urgent first. But if we are constantly busy only with him, we never get to the really important.

Lao Tzu once remarked: “Saying 'I have no time' is the same as saying 'I don't want to do this.' And Picasso advised "to postpone until tomorrow only what you do not want to complete until the end of your life."

Turn important things into urgent ones

Set a deadline

They are the ones who make urgent matters urgent. If an important task has no deadline, you will always put it off until later. Therefore, try to break your important business into small steps and set a deadline for each.

Determine the consequences

But the deadline alone is not enough. After all, if you promise yourself to go to the gym this week, but don't keep your promise, nothing bad will happen and you will simply postpone the date for next week. Missing deadlines has to have some serious consequences for you to really get motivated.

Here are some ways to help you take your deadlines more seriously.

1. State your intention

So you definitely can't just brush off your promise. But just set a really realistic timeline.

2. Enter rewards and punishments

Think over the system of rewards and punishments in advance. Just keep in mind that it is not you yourself who should encourage or punish yourself at the end of the term, it is better to ask one of your friends.

3. Leave yourself reminders

You can easily forget about deadlines if nothing reminds you of them. Therefore, take care of this in advance. Put the date on your calendar, put stickers on your desk, you can even hang one in the bathroom or kitchen.

There will always be urgent matters, they will be enough for a whole day, a week, a year, or even a whole life. But it is much more important to spend time and energy on really meaningful things, so that later you do not regret that you did not have time to do it.