As a young bloke, I was given a “XY” graph that had “urgent, not urgent, important, not important” on the axes as a personal management tool.
I was advised to concentrate my effort on the “Important, not urgent” quadrant, as those are the things that will make the real difference, add the sustainable value, and told that things in the “urgent not important” quadrant are the ones would absorb all the time if allowed, and it would take only personal discipline to manage the allocation of time, and expectations of others.
Now we have a myriad of new distractions in the urgent but not important (but perhaps compelling?) quartile, the mass of stuff on the net, and the social applications to absorb our time, the task has multiplied, perhaps by logarithmic rates.
Tom Fishburne, as usual, collects the problem into one “iprocrastinate” cartoon. Lovely.
