Where's The Fire In Your Work?

5:42am — the firehouse alarm rings, and ninety seconds later, Engine No. 42 rolls out of the station, on its way to a two-alarm fire.

9:17am — after settling into the controller’s chair in the aviation tower at O’Hare, Jim Whasshisface plugs his headset into the console, and guides airplanes to safe landings, one after the next.

10:51am — the Madison High School bell rings, and students flood the hallways, scurrying like decaffeinated beavers on their way to their next subject.

But when you sit down at your desk each morning, do you know — with half the clarity of firemen, air traffic controllers, or high school students — what you should work on?

It’s a classic dilemma, one that plagues just about every single small business person I know. For people who run their own businesses, the struggle for certainty is constant.

But why are they so clear, and I’m so clueless?

Because firemen, air traffic controllers, and high school students all have two things in droves, that you, sitting at your computer each day, only have a trickle of.

Urgency, and Importance.

Firemen (firepeople? firepersons?) know that when that alarm sounds, they have a situation that’s in dire need of their attention. Air traffic controllers have planes that need to land, or they’re going to run out of fuel. And high school students know that if they’re late to class, they’re going to get busted. These are all excellent examples of Urgency.

When something is urgent, its time is now. Not tomorrow, not after the next planning session, not after lunch — now.

(Is that stressful? It can be; it just depends on how you manage it.)

Firemen also know that when an alarm isn’t sounding, the maintenance they do on their equipment could save their lives on their next call. Air traffic controllers know that bringing one plane in ahead of another could make a huge difference in how on-time subsequent, connecting flights are going to be. And high school students will come this close to running to their lockers in between classes, if they forgot their writing assignment for English class. That’s Importance at work.

When something is important, it demands your focus. You know you can’t drop the ball, because if you do, there are consequences — sometimes severe ones — to that lapse in focus.

Urgency and Importance. They shape your life. They define your priorities. And, they can make you more productive than squirrels going after nuts in the Fall.

The question is, without something like a two-alarm fire, or a 747 flying on fumes, or Mr. Engfelt’s steely gaze on you if you walk in late, how can you keep track of Urgency and Importance in your day-to-day work?

There’s a fantastic post over at “Scrollin’ On Dubs” about Urgency and Importance, where Sean Tierney writes about how to track what’s Urgent and Important in your work.

Essentially, he talks about superimposing a graph, such as this one…:

… on top of your projects. What he says about it is this:

I’ve found once you are able to visualize your todo list in this 2-d fashion it helps in a couple respects:

1. You’re able to tease apart those items which truly have the ability to advance your cause from the ones that are just stressing you out because they’re yelling for your immediate attention. It’s an important distinction and critical to being effective.

2. If you keep your items stored visually in this fashion it lets you quickly handle items in the right quadrant depending on the situation. You should obviously try to work on the right-most items as much as possible while giving attention to the upper right quadrant first. During the day, forget that the left quadrants even exist. When you’re decompressing, go to the lower-left. When you’re catching up on errands, upper-left. The point is you always know what you should be doing.

3. This leads to what David Allen calls the “mind like water” feeling of being at peace even in the face of massive amounts of todo items. Even when there’s a kajillion things going on, there’s something about having an accurate picture of the field and knowing that your items are stored in a trusted system and you’re knocking out the priorities first.

The one thing I wouldn’t recommend adopting from his post, however, is the idea of dragging all those items to your desktop in order to manage your workload.

I read recently that every item on your desktop uses as much memory (RAM) as an open window does; if you have as many items on your desktop as you’d need to effectively manage your load, you could run the risk of seriously slowing down your computer’s functions, which could damage your productivity rather than enhance it. Not good.

However, you could use the strategy, but shift the tools a bit…

I use a Mac-only program called Curio that allows me 99% flexibility in managing objects in a document (everything from text to shapes to colors to whatever), to arrange my to-do items in Sean’s Urgency & Importance quadrants, so I have an instant, firefighter-esque grasp on what needs my attention at any point in my day (the picture I posted above is, with the arrows and such removed, my graphic list in Curio).

If you know of a Windows solution, feel free to post it in the Comments, by the way.

When you are effectively tracking what’s Urgent and what’s Important in your work, then you can ask yourself, “Where’s the fire?” and know what the answer is. It’s one of the primary keys to staying “on target” and accomplishing what’s really going to make the difference in your business.