Ignoring next actions on secondarily important actions and projects because you are too busy and concerned with urgent things fosters continual crisis management. It never self-corrects—it self-perpetuates. Where do fires and crises come from? Usually from not-so-urgent things that people ignore because they are distracted by the crises of the moment. Then, ignored, they cause the next fires and crises.
Someone heard second hand about my two-minute rule (if the action on something takes less than two minutes, do it as soon as you look at or think of it) and thought it was ineffective. “I’d waste my whole day doing 2-minute things, many of which are not that important.” My retort was: if they’re not important enough to do, they’re not important enough to do at all! You’re either going to do something or you’re not. If you’re going to do it at all, and it takes less than two minutes, 95% of the time you’ll save time and be much more proactive if you do it immediately. (Many big and important projects have a two-minute-or-less next action on them too, by the way.)
I’m not talking about ignoring priorities. I am talking about capturing, deciding, and organizing action steps about everything we have our attention on, big and little. Little, ldquo;unimportant” things too often demand much more attention later on than they deserve, and become too “important” because they weren’t handled when they would have been easy. And many of them can be handled very efficiently in the little weird windows of time we get in odd situations and circumstances. My “total life to-do list”, with me all the time, provides me with lots of options to maximize my productivity wherever and whenever. It creates much more smooth sailing through the mundane day-to-dayness of life. It breaks the cycle of the eternally urgent.
A crisis should be a crisis. Urgent things should be urgent. And they should be exceptional.
[Note: This essay appeared in David Allen’s Productive Living Newsletter. Subscribe for free here.]
