Urgent Versus Important

“Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I entrust my life.” (Psalm 143:8, NIV)

You probably know from personal experience that there is no shortage of interruptions that can potentially hijack your day! When something or someone suddenly interrupts us, we often automatically drop what we’re doing and pivot to tend to the interruption. Sometimes we face one interruption after another, and before long, our day is completely off track. By then, we’re not just feeling frustrated; we’re overwhelmed with all we still have to do.

It’s nearly impossible to avoid all the interruptions that spring up throughout the day. But what we can do is learn to distinguish which interruptions are truly important enough to deserve our immediate attention. Not everything that presents to us as urgent is actually important! Recognizing the difference between urgent and important and responding accordingly can keep us from becoming overwhelmed.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines urgent as something that demands immediate attention. It defines important as something that has significant worth or significant consequence. The danger is that if it is our habit to always respond immediately to interruptions that are urgent—or appear to be—we may not only get overwhelmed, but we may never get around to the things that are more important and in sync with God’s purposes for our day, or in the big picture, for our lives. Charles Hummel, author of the iconic little book, Tyranny of the Urgent, pointed out that every need or problem, no matter how urgent, is not necessarily a call from God to meet it.

The call must come from the Lord who knows our limitations...It is not God who loads us until we bend or break with an ulcer, heart attack or stroke. These largely come from our inner compulsions under the pressure of external demands.^a

Prayer helps us to discern between urgent and important. We’re wise to resist the urge to leap to immediately respond to every interruption or automatically heed every demand (lest we disappoint someone), but to instead pause to ask, “Lord, what would you have me do?” If we make it our practice to reflect before responding, we may return a different answer than if we had responded right away.

We can learn a lot from good time managers! They start each day by identifying their MITs—Most Important Tasks. MITs are the three to five things they will focus on and try to accomplish first. That way, no matter what else does or doesn’t get done, at the end of the day, at least the most important things will have been completed.

Even when something is truly urgent, it doesn’t always mean we must drop everything and spring into action the instant we learn of it. If we’ve set aside a time block to work on our MITs, sometimes we can defer an urgent matter until our block of focus-time is over. If an urgent matter is more important than the MIT we’re in the middle of, we may choose to act on it right then. The point is that our MITs don’t always have to succumb to the tyranny of the urgent.

Questions to Ponder and Pray About

• How difficult is it for you to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important?
• Are most of the interruptions you deal with more urgent or more important?
• Do you think it would be helpful to prayerfully establish MITs at the beginning of each day?