Focus: Urgent vs. Important

Focus is the key to reaching any goal. Whether we are talking about a simple project or a complex business objective, you need to focus on the task at hand in order to accomplish it. The same holds true for your health. You need to focus on your health in order to improve it. In other words, we can’t simply expect things to change if we don’t focus on changing them. I have noticed that this has been a major barrier for many people.

Why do we have so much trouble focusing on our health? We struggle to find focus around things that don’t take precedence. Is our health important to us? Yes, in general, our health is very important to us. Even those of us that have neglected our health for years, still would consider it to be important. The problem is, in our lives, important doesn’t get done until after the urgent. Urgent issues take precedence over important issues in our day to day lives. Now I’m not trying to tell you what is or isn’t important in your life. I’m simply illustrating the difference between these two categories and how it makes life (at least a healthy life) more difficult.

Imagine sitting in a busy office trying to work. For many of us, this isn’t too hard to picture. The task at hand is a very important report for your boss. You’ve been working on it successfully for a few hours until the phone rings. Even if you don’t answer the phone, it is a distraction and you have to gather your thoughts again. As soon as you are back on track, a coworker pops over and asks a question. By the time they leave, you’ve lost a few minutes of work time. Not a catastrophic event, but when another coworker stops by and asks you to do something else, you’ve now realized that the report is not coming along as you want it to. As soon as you get back to your report, you see an email pop into your inbox that explains an urgent situation that needs your immediate attention. Naturally, this concerns you and you read it. By the time you read the email and decide how to respond, you’ve lost another few minutes and this important report has been pushed off yet again.

Think of your health as this report. It is important to you, but there are urgent things that keep coming up to pull you away from it. The ringing phone, the coworker and the email are all metaphors for the other things that keep us from the tasks that we know will help us live healthy lives. In many cases, they are not metaphors at all. These urgent matters or distractions are all too literal.
So what do we do? Many of us struggle with this question. The answer is honestly to start looking at the importance of what we are doing. Whether you are working on that report or trying to include more healthy habits in your day, you have to establish the importance. Once you do that, so called urgent or distracting influences simply don’t interrupt your focus. But this can only happen when YOU establish the importance of what you are doing.

At work, it may mean closing your office door or forwarding your calls to voicemail. You may even want to turn off the pop-up function on your office email so you don’t see every email until it is time to deal with them. By setting time aside and honoring that time, you can accomplish much more. The same goes for healthy habits. Make an appointment on your calendar to go for your walk. If someone is standing at your desk, simply tell them, I’ve got an appointment in five minutes, so I will have to step away.

By making appointments with yourself, you bring the accountability that comes with importance. Important things go on the calendar. You set reminders so you don’t forget important things. Urgent things just sort of happen. If you are free, guess what, now you are dealing with this other task. If you are already engaged, now you can prioritize and decide which is more important.

Clearly, there many ways in which these scenarios can play out. I know that not all situations are flexible and there are times when we have to do what has to be done. What I am saying is that if we decide what is important and focus on it, we can accomplish it. If there are distractions and other things coming in the way, what do we need to do in order to eliminate them? If we don’t focus, we can’t progress with the goals that we want to progress with. In other words, the important things in our lives don’t get done.

This is what I help clients do. I don’t tell you what to do. I don’t try to make my priorities your priorities. But I do help you put your priorities in order. Not only do we work to decide what your priorities are, but we will start to focus on those important priorities. And that is the key. As soon as you are focusing on what is important to you, you are successful. Not only are you successfully reaching goals, you are also bringing fulfillment into your life as you accomplish what is truly important to you.