📓 A playbook for balancing the "urgent" against the "important"
How to find runway for important personal investments, and play the long-game with your life.
A brief story: A flight from New York to Istanbul
I’m wedged between 48E and 48G in an esteemed locale about two-feet from the rear lavatory of a Boeing 747. It’s hour 9 of my 11 hour flight to Istanbul, and I definitely herniated a disk last night.
I’ve also lost some sensation in my left baby toe. This little piggy got itself in a pickle. The unavoidable consequence of my poor circulation and strict budget for trans-continental travel.
Such is life for us cattle in Economy seating.
But, in spite of all the unpleasantries described above, I actually have a controversial opinion to share. I like long plane rides.
I dare say that I even love them — if the statement wasn’t such cause for mental health concern (Mad cow in stall 48F!) that you’d have me swiftly, mercifully put down.
But, do this ol’Bessie parked in the back a solid, will you?
Just hear her out.
The Challenge: Navigating a crowded routine
Apart from the less than perfect physical conditions of air travel (by my calculations, about 1% more humane than those offered your average bovine), I actually find the mental conditions to be a rare and welcome comfort.
Sure, the quarters are close and you’re in a vicious shoulder-war with the grumpy mule grazing next to you. But, apart from that —a literal pressing need to protect cluttered and contested territory on the arm-rest — there aren’t many pressing matters to attend to in the air. In fact, your conscience is pretty clear. What the cabin lacks in leg space, I find it makes up for in headspace.
All of those burdensome to-do lists that we lug around on land, day-in and day-out, just can’t be brought on board.
…that project brief with more critical in-line comments than a Senate bill.
…that unsubmitted tax filing that’s still missing Form 1090-something.
…that multi-page email from your Aunt Peg wishing you a happy birthday and awaiting more than a one-word (“thanks”) reply.
…and the marketing pitch you already dazzled the client with, but haven’t pecked out a word of detail on for the memo you promised them by Monday.
That’s a lot of mental baggage. But, on flights, it might as well be checked in the cargo hold.
It’ll meet you on the other side, but there’s no point bringing a to-do as carry-on in the cabin, when it can’t be easily to-done from the air. And you can thank the shoddy wifi for that — woefully bad and reliably unusable, once you’re already $29.99 poorer.
But, I find that to be a wonderful change of pace: it’s rare to have time ring-fenced away from urgent demands.
Which also perhaps explains why we choose to go positively catatonic in these flying cylindrical cans. The only other opportunity for that sweet mental rest from urgent demands is when you kick the can. So we either pop Benadryl until we sink into a Snow White sleep coma or binge back-to-back Marvel movies in a dazed stupor until our eyes bleed.
The most urgent matter in the air boils down to the 5-second decision on your “risk appetite” — which goo (unnamed mystery meat? or perhaps, viscous veggie?) you want to take your chances with. That is, if the meal service ever even reaches you in rows so far back that they’re irrational. (If you need me, you can surely find me in the row just after the square root of -1).
But here’s the thing:
As long as I eventually get fed to quell any possible hanger, I actually feel lucky to have this time. And more specifically, I’m grateful for almost zero urgent decisions required of me, in this small stall I call my own.
When we set aside time from the things that feel urgent, we may find headspace to channel towards things that are important — things that never got our focus because they never made it past all the fires.
We can just contemplate. About anything and anyone. And hopefully, ourselves.
That’s what I like to do most on planes. And sometimes that can look unsettling from afar. In my case: a woman with a droopy bun, foul breathe and empty cow eyes staring into a horrifically drab seatback pocket.
Poetic, it is not.
And yet, productive, I weirdly find it to be.
In the depths of this unstructured time, with the least expectations on my productivity — I sometimes, find the most. And sometimes even end up disembarking airplanes with decisions that had been percolating on my mind for months. When my lopsided tray table wasn’t being used as a trough, I may have even managed to get a few of those takeaways jotted down into a notebook.
We have time to have time to stare into the abyss of big, important, sometimes overwhelmingly open-ended questions, that we know we need to look into at some point, but never do. Let alone make a game plan for them.
Who would’ve thought we needed to have time to have time, for thought?
Answer: Not me.
And plane rides probably shouldn’t be the only time we have time for it.
And that, dear friends, was the crux of my problem.
The Root Cause: Understanding the distinction between “importance” and “urgency”
For a long time, I was carrying around some big questions that felt far heavier than the 25kgs allowed on most commercial flights. The annoying thing about those questions and accompanying pending decisions though, was that they weren’t urgent. It wasn’t essential that I answer them today.
And I told myself that, everyday.
After all…
…there’s no exploding deadline to make a call on a career pivot that’s been simmering on your mind— a few more months will surely give me more certainty one way or another!
…there’s no immediate and obvious consequence if you don’t think too deeply on why you’ve never been able to feel “passionate” about something — surely these sorts of things just come to one eventually, in their own time!
…and nothing will violently erupt if you punt on clarifying what you want out of your 6-month situationship — let’s just pick this messy matter back up after Valentine’s Day, aye dear?
Plus, you’ve got board decks to prep for your boss. And Maid of Honor duties to deliver for your bridezilla bestie. And other critically time-sensitive responsibilities to uphold — lest you let other people down.
Only one problem:
When you repeatedly delay on important things that don’t have immediate urgency — you’re probably already letting one person down without even realizing it: the more fulfilled, future version of you.
I think we’d all agree that this person is very important! Philosophically. But philosophy ain’t much use when there’s no action or urgency behind it.
I suspect the root cause here for why we don't ringfence more time for important decisions or investments stems partly from the fact that we don’t believe there to be a difference between “importance” and “urgency.” We bundle the two concepts. And that’s a blunder.
Because while there can be overlap (many urgent things are indeed important), that’s not strictly the case. So, the distinction that I’m using here considers a few different patterns between the two:
The time horizon of the impact: Urgent things have impact that’s front loaded and often time-boxed. Important things deliver impact that’s backloaded or staggered over time.
The scope clarity of the impact: Urgent things are often more clearly scoped and certain, with more predictable outcomes. Important things are often more ambiguous or uncertain in their potential impact (which makes them all the easier to punt on).
The inflection capacity of the impact: Urgent things tend to maintain status quo and “keep the lights on,” or only marginally accelerate impact over time. Important things generally have the potential to create significant inflection in trajectory if committed to.
The durability of the impact: Urgent things may deliver impact that’s brittle or depreciates over time. Important things have sustained value that might even accrue or compound.
That may all still seem understandably opaque.
So let me try to make this a bit more concrete.
An Example: Load balancing in the world of Tech
The battle between importance and urgency is one that I’ve witnessed play out not only in my personal life, but also in my professional one — time and time again. It’s a common trope in the world of Tech:
Quick! We need to build that new feature in the product to win the deal with Customer X, and patch that bug before we lose Customer Y to Competitor Z!
That’s urgent to do, now. But if we had enough breathing room…might we take a step back to address a more fundamental question?
Should we slow down new feature work to instead refactor the platform? Might we make a step-function change in reliability and ship better features faster in the future if we did so?
That sounds important to answer, at a minimum. And probably important to do.
But not now, silly!
Just, eventually.
So let’s park that puppy in the product backlog — effectively a Chuck’E’Cheese playpen filled with a sea of small plastic balls in too many blindingly bright primary colors. Have fun finding headspace to fish that one out.
In the world of Tech — it’s hard to balance investments that inflect growth over the long-run, when you’ve got a business to run day-in and day-out. But, the best businesses do before their platform is so bloated with bugs that it topples over entirely. In fact, nearly every major software company has had to go through significant architectural overhauls of their platforms — efforts that were tremendously costly and delicate, because they repeat-a-punted on important platform investments for too long.
And yes: making those important, but non-urgent time investments disappoints some customers that don’t get their demands met. And yes: it often leaves money on the table in the near-term.
But, a pattern remains clear:
The best businesses— the ones with healthy sustained growth that withstands the tests of time — effectively load balance time between urgent and important investments on a rolling basis.
And, I suspect, the same is true for durably happy, fulfilled human beings.
Many businesses mess it up all the time though. And those that haven’t, have just developed and enforced better operating models to hedge against it. Some even get as explicit as defining a percentage for near-term “product” (say, 70%) and long-term “platform” (say, 30%) investments that they consistently map their engineering capacity to.
So, I wonder — is it so crazy to think we might need the same?
A playbook for balancing importance and urgency in our daily routines?
A playbook for playing the long-game on our life.
The Playbook: Carving out a routine that plays the long-game on life
There was a significant stretch of my life — say 10 years, or so — when I was convinced that I was giving the important, lingering questions headspace.
Which was true. Ish.
I had them on my mind. So I was technically thinking about them. But I wasn’t actively driving towards decisions or executing game plans against them, with a deadline to get to closure. When you’re already juggling so many urgent external deadlines, who wants to self-impose another?
Time needed to be inherently unusable for urgent tasks (say, a plane ride?), in order for me to spend it on something else.
News flash, Sabey-baby: a few hours every few months on plane rides shouldn’t be the only time spent on meaningful self-contemplation.
It took me too long to draw that conclusion. My suggestion instead?
Carve out the time in your routine for important tasks over urgent ones, even if it feels painfully over-engineered. Even if it feels utterly contrived.
If you don’t ringfence time to stare into the abyss of important questions, and drive a game plan against them, you’re lying to your present self and doing wrong by your future self. Because you just never will.
And perhaps consider something like this:
Crystalize the questions that have been percolating. List out important questions, prompts or plans, that aren’t demanding your time, but should. Something that’s been simmering in that big’ol noggin of yours that you know you need to think on more — something that you may even feel guilty about because you know that you haven’t. It’s a fair bet that represents something that’s important, but not urgent.
Write it down on a sticky note. Plant that puppy on your bathroom mirror. Because, yep — you’re going to stare into that neon abyss every freaking morning. Just to remind yourself that this is as important to consider daily, as brushing your teeth. And if you can’t get yourself to additionally commit to steps 3 and 4 below, at least you can spend 90 seconds each morning and night prompted by something deeply long-term meaningful, while also preventing a cavity or two.
Schedule guilt-free unstructured time for thinking. The key here is to make this hyper-explicit and “scheduled:” an integrated part of your routine. You’re not wasting time by thinking on this instead of doing something urgent — this is urgent. This is table stakes — and you’ve proactively ring fenced time to sit down at a table to think on it. It’s even got its own blue box on your Google Calendar, so you know it’s real. On top of that, consider also getting in the habit of just re-purposing some physical things in your routine that wouldn’t suffer from a little more mental movement. My personal favorites are plane rides, showers and long walks — where I try to be slightly more thoughtful about using the time to think on long-term questions, rather than groom my running to-do list.
A brief aside and alternative: If you’re having trouble finding time in your routine for this, you can also do what my friend did recently and fly to Nepal to hike the Himalayas, where his blood oxygen level hovered around 55% for multiple days straight and he vomited about as often as he blinked. (When asked what could have possibly compelled him to want to do this, he replied: “Mental illness, of course!”). Suffice it to say: I might recommend finding some time in your existing routine first, before your mental baggage requires a sherpa, and your long list of urgent tasks can only be escaped in the remote outpost of Everest Base Camp.
Transcribe the takeaways each week (i.e. Journal) and commit to one action ahead of the next week. Writing may not be your thing, and that’s okay. And you may be a huge skeptic on its value. I get it — I’ve been there. But nothing got me through my quarter-life crisis quite like it. Journaling can be a powerful forcing function for decision-making, and it needs to be scheduled, especially if it’s not fun for you. I’m convinced that it’s one of the only ways we can hold ourselves accountable to ourselves, by requiring us to get specific and declarative on what we’re feeling, what we want, and what the plan is to get there. The goal with journaling might be to distill one insight each week on paper from all of that think-time, and convert it into one action with a deadline by the end of next week — to incrementally invest in your future self.
As a final note: know that you need to get over some hump here. It’s not going to feel like you’re hatching gold bullion eggs of personal epiphany every 2 minutes.
But my 2-cents: trust the process just enough to try the process.
Takeaways
If one things clear from the above, hopefully it’s this: none of this is rocket science. It’s not complicated. It’s just not urgent.
And, the hardest part may even be that it just feels so dang contrived. Which gives many of us the ick.
Myself included.
But don’t let your cynicism for the contrived nature of a playbook stop you from giving it a go. In fact, try to remember that your cynicism is probably more of a fear of delayed or uncertain future gratification inherent to meaningful things:
Urgent things are lucrative because they make us feel confident that we used our time efficiently today. Important things are more intimidating because they often feel like the opposite: an inefficient use of time today, even when we know there’s the potential for significant impact over the long-run.
To honor the latter in my routine, I try to remember the feeling that I’m ultimately going for: fulfillment, in the form of self-growth. It’s the deep satisfaction that comes when you look back and realize how far your own capabilities and strengths have come, and the knowledge that you can unleash that on anything going forward.
Fulfillment is the freedom to feel fearless.
But getting there, is anchored on seeing the fruits of growth. And growth is a time game — one that masterfully balances practical urgent needs, while pulling forward important long-term investments.
So start creating the runway for that now. And barrel ahead.
Because you might just find that the views from above— that bold, fearless, future you — make it all well worth it.
If you found something here that speaks to you…
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