I hate the very smell of shellfish. I am sure I would hate taste too, but I will never know because I just cannot get past that smell. The concept of eating shellfish, because of the the odour, induces abundant stomach churning and heaving. I believe in an abundant life, I just don’t subscribe to that notion when it comes to vomiting.

And here I am, sat in a Red Lobster with my girlfriend, painfully aware of exactly how a vegan or vegetarian feels when faced with the spectre of dining with friends at a steak restaurant.

It probably does not help that my diet is 80 percent vegetarian. Finally I understand on a visceral level a vegetarian’s distress when faced with meat.

I have a few friends (a very few friends ) who utterly detest the smell and taste of curry but I never really understood it.

“Yes, yes I sympathise, but you have no idea what you are missing you miserable mortal.” would be my thought. I guess from now on I have to be a little more considerate of them. But only a little.

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Do you deal mostly with urgent tasks in your day-to-day work?

Unless you are a fire fighter or paramedic most of your work should consist of well-planned, directed tasks. Tasks that should have been decided upon well in advance, days or perhaps even weeks ahead of time. You should be able to predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what you will be working on for any day in the next two weeks.

And if you cannot do that, then you have two problems.

The first problem is that you are dealing mostly with unplanned for, urgent tasks. Tasks that just seem to appear out of nowhere and consume most of what should be a productive work day. This is the kind of work that causes stress, temper tantrums and really sub-standard work.

You might feel as though you are accomplishing a lot each time you take care of some urgent problem that has just come to your attention but you are actually wasting a lot of effort, but more importantly, a lot of valuable time, dealing with issues that should have been planned, days or weeks in advance.

The hitch with emergencies is that because there is so little warning, there is very little planning or first-rate, quality problem solving that goes in to the solution.

The main goal of “urgent” is to get whatever the problem is, out of the way, as quickly as possible, so that you can get back to what you were doing previously.

By ignoring problems or things to be done, until just before they are needed, you are operating entirely in crisis management mode when communication is at a minimum and solutions are less than optimal.

Urgent tasks in a well run life or business are so rare that the procrastination that took place to turn a boring, routine task into an emergency is unfathomable and indicative or a deep problem.

The second problem you face of dealing with anything urgent is that you have no personal control of what you work on.

Whether the task was devised by you, or given to you by someone you work for, if it has become urgent, it means you are not in control and somebody else is dictating to you how you should perform your job. And under those conditions, you cannot do your best work, ever.

If you are dealing with more than one urgent task in any single workweek, you’re doing it wrong.

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