When your son tells you that your house is falling down you pay attention.
In actual case it was just some cracks appearing in the wall. It’s because we have a newly built apartment and after a little settling in cracks can appear in the plaster and paint. For DIY’ers this is common knowledge but I had to double check first!
Well today I’m actually going to tackle fixing them with a quick sand down, some Polyfilla and a lick of paint. Why is this of an interest you might be wondering?
Well, it got me thinking about importance and urgency. This is something that Steven Covey put so brilliantly in his effective habits series. The idea is that the actionable tasks in your life can come from four areas: Important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, not important and not urgent. This applies to my cracked walls as much as it does to your online business.
Let me explain… I wish you would, you all say.
My walls are in the important but not urgent category. The house won’t fall down if I don’t get round to it, but completing this task will have a big impact on our life and my son will be able to use the bathroom without thinking it’s going to fall on his head. Win-win.
For your business this could be writing your email responder series before your list has yet taken off. It’s not urgent but it’s certainly important. The thing is that if you put it off and wait until it becomes urgent you are then going to be rushing to finish your email series and will probably not do a great job of it, you’ll make mistakes and all that.
Let’s look at some others to get more of a feel for it.
Important and urgent –
- Your site has been hacked
- Your hosting is down
- You sent the wrong download link to your customers
Important but not urgent –
- You have a new product to finish.
- Blog posts
- Emailing your subscribers
- Connecting your network
- Fixing your site’s security.
Not important but urgent –
- Most email tasks
- Dealing with interruptions
- Answering queries from tyre kickers
Not important or urgent
- Tinkering with your website
- Getting distracted by social media
- Reading junk emails
The idea is that to really notice some progression in your business (and DIY) you want to increase the number of tasks that are in the important but not urgent category.
It reminds me of how long it takes people to fit a smoke alarm in their kitchen. We all know it’s essential but until you’ve had a pan fire ( or seen some footage designed to wake you up) it’s easy to put it off. Well now is the time to make one change to help your business take off. Once you’ve dealt with the emergencies ( if there are any) then get to work on the important but not urgent actions.
Now, where did I put that paintbrush?