This is one of the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (a self-help book from 1989), but they borrowed it from the “Eisenhower Matrix”.

It sounds simple, but it provides a surprisingly powerful way of thinking about what to focus on.

Tasks are categorised by whether they are urgent and/or important, creating one of the 2x2 grids beloved by management types:

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Emergencies	Strategic work
Not Important	Interruptions	Trivia

By default, people tend to prioritise urgent work. However, you should actually intentionally reduce the amount of time you spend on urgent work, and instead focus on the important strategic work in “quadrant 2”.

In the long term this strategic work usually helps to reduce the amount of urgent work, but in the short term it can be hard to make time for it. It is usually worth the investment, so put some effort in to making it happen.

What Counts as Urgent?

There are different degrees of urgency. An ongoing fault or incident affecting customers is obviously urgent.

However, rushing to deliver a new product or feature with a tight deadline also counts as urgent if it means you don’t have time to design or build things the way you’d like.

Under this definition, some teams spend their whole time in the “urgent” column, alternating between emergencies and interruptions. This doesn’t give them time to do the strategic work which would make most of the urgent work go away - and at the same time they are piling up more and more “technical debt” of bodges and shortcuts that were needed to get the “urgent” features out of the door. These shortcuts cause faults, leading to more urgent incident-response work.

At some point this snowplough is going to grind to a halt. Before that happens, make time to create a strategic plan and start executing it, even if it means you have to disappoint a few people in the short term.