If ya gotta eat a frog, why sit around and look at it all day?
Updated: 1 day ago
Two Timeless Principles for Managing Time and Tasks
Many moons ago I taught time management courses for Franklin Covey—actually it was a wonderful little company that was bought by Franklin Covey, but no one’s heard of it, so I just say Franklin Covey.
Anyway, there are a few productivity principles from that course that have stayed with me over the years. They’re like old, polished stones that I carry around in my pocket. They’ve been there so long and I use them so often that I tend to forget about them.
But they're hugely important to me, and I keep coming back to them in my work with managers and executives. They get at a question I return to often: Does the way we spend our time reflect what we say matters most?
Thought I’d share them with you here.
There are two at the top of the list, and they are principles for prioritizing: Urgency vs. Importance and The Pareto Principle.
I lean on these heavily for helping me organize and manage my time, the tasks on my to-do list, and other things that require prioritizing—meeting agendas, errands to run, people to call, etc.
Urgency and Importance
Here's a useful way to think about the relationship between urgency and importance.
We hear these words all the time, right? “Do it now, it’s urgent!!” or “Please, this is important to me.” But take a moment to think about these terms carefully, let’s define them.
Let’s look at importance first.
Importance
How DO you define importance? How DO you know if something’s important?
I'd propose that something is important when it moves us toward our goals, reflects our values, or serves our mission. For us as individuals, those are personal. In business, they're the goals, values, and mission of our organization, department, or team.
It’s not uncommon for people to confuse importance with urgency. While importance is associated with that which we value, urgency is associated with, well, time—deadlines, speed, crises, things of that nature.
When I speak about this topic with teams and organizations, I find really smart people often define importance with phrases like these:
I know it’s important if it has to be done now.
If it has a time-value associated with it, it’s important.
Well, she (my boss) said she needed it yesterday.
I like to haggle with them a bit. But usually we get around to agreeing that each of these statements speaks of urgency, not importance. Each includes or is driven by a time-element, and as soon as we start talking about time, we’re in the realm of urgency.
So, separate these two things, urgency and importance.
When Personal and Organizational Goals Align
Several years ago, I picked up a wonderful model for thinking about what’s important from a mentor of mine at the company Blessing/White (now a part of GP Strategies).
I’ve drawn it out for you here. (Sorry it looks like it was drawn out on a napkin. It was, er, drawn out on a napkin. And EE stands for employee.)
So, I found this model valuable for thinking about how we define importance. Here’s how it works:
There are two paths—one representing an individual (employee) and her progress toward achieving her goals (or her mission in life), and the other representing an organization’s progress toward its goals (or its mission).
The goals on these paths are represented as targets at the top.
The individual works for or within the organization, so the paths cross.
Anything on either path is important to that party—it helps the individual or the organization move toward its goals. Anything off both paths, not so much.
To help us play with this model for a moment, let’s examine the intersection of the paths.
Imagine an employee who's doing terrific work for the organization while also making progress toward their own goals. They're in the sweet spot at the top of the diamond. Both parties are getting what they want.
But what happens when the employee contributes to the organization's goals without getting much of what they want in return? Or when an employee is getting everything they want but contributing little to the organization?
Neither situation is likely to be sustainable. And that's why clarity about what matters to both parties is so important.
The Importance of Knowing What's Important
The point is simple: Managers need to be clear about what their teams are trying to accomplish, and employees need to be clear about what they want from their work.
Or, as the Cheshire Cat is often paraphrased:
Without that clarity, it's very easy to stay busy while heading in the wrong direction.
As the line often attributed to the Cheshire Cat goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll get you there.”
So, coming back around to importance, what I'd like you to take away from this is that importance is tied to what we value—our personal goals and mission, or the goals and mission of our organization or team.
And here's why that matters so much. When we're not clear about what we value, we lose our ability to tell what's important. And when we can't tell what's important, urgency rushes in to fill the gap. Whatever is loudest, latest, or closest to a deadline wins. Without our ever really deciding, urgency starts making our decisions for us.
It's true for individuals, and it's even more consequential for teams. When managers aren't clear about what the organization values, every competing request looks equally important. So the loudest one wins—or the decision gets kicked upstairs.
A founder might insist that developing capable managers is a top priority. But if most of their time is spent solving problems those managers could be learning to solve, what does that tell us about their actual priorities?
Urgency
Importance is the difficult one; urgency’s easy.
What do we mean by urgency? How do you know if something is urgent?
It’s time sensitive. That's it. It's simple.
Let’s look at an example.
Say you need to prepare your taxes and it’s January. Taxes are due on April 15th. Is preparing them at that time urgent?
Heck no. Not at all.
It’s important, but it’s not urgent. You’ve got several months to finish them.
But let’s say it’s April 14th and your taxes are still not done.
Yikes! Now, it’s both urgent AND important, right?
Given that example, how does it become urgent?
It’s urgent because it’s time-driven and you’re really close to the deadline. You waited until it became urgent. The closer you get to the deadline, the more urgent it becomes.
So, of course, the trick is to let importance drive most of your decision-making, not urgency. Learn to act on things that are important BEFORE they become urgent.
The Pareto Principle
We've separated what's important from what's urgent. But when the list of important things is still too long, where do we start?
That's where the Pareto Principle—also known as the 80/20 rule—comes in. It's another one of my favorites, partly because it's useful and partly because it's fun to spot in everyday life.
The Story
There’s this guy, Vilfredo Pareto, he was an Italian economist. I don’t know all the details, but sometime in the early 1900s he woke up one morning and realized that about 20% of the people in his region owned about 80% of the land.
Decades later, a quality engineer named Joseph Juran saw the same pattern in manufacturing defects — a few causes behind most of the problems — and borrowed Pareto’s name for it, calling it ‘the vital few and the trivial many.’ (Juran later admitted he could just as easily have called it the Juran principle.)
The Pareto principle: 20% of one thing often makes up 80% of another.
The proportions aren't always exactly 80/20, but you can spot patterns like these almost everywhere:
Transportation – 20% of the people on the highway cause 80% of the traffic problems
Fashion – You wear 20% of the clothes in your closet 80% of the time
Sales – 20% of your account executives bring in 80% of the new business
Customer Service – 20% of your customers have 80% of the issues
Absenteeism – 20% of your employees are sick 80% of the time
Social Media – 20% of your LinkedIn contacts are involved in 80% of your interactions
Look around you. Examples of this are everywhere—a relatively small percentage of one thing accounting for a disproportionately large percentage of another.
How to Use the Principle
Alright, enough of that. So, how does this apply to your to-do list?
Given almost any list—your to-do list, a meeting agenda, or even a grocery list—some items will contribute far more to your desired results than others. The trick is to identify those high-impact items and move them toward the top.
I find those top-priority items typically include things like these:
Following up on commitments and promises
High-payback items
Things that will cause significant problems for me or my organization if not addressed soon
Reminds me of something my grandmother used to say: “If ya gotta eat a frog, why sit around and look at it all day.”
So, look for the few things that matter most—especially the unpleasant ones you've been avoiding—and tackle them. Let importance, not urgency, drive your decisions.
Want to help your managers get better at solving the right problems?
I help growing companies develop management teams that make sound decisions, collaborate effectively, and carry more of the company's weight. If that sounds useful, I'd welcome a conversation.
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