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.