Seth Godin posted an excellent blog post on urgency and putting out fires. He really defines what EADD is all about – we are so busy doing stuff that is urgent that we never get to the important things of our business:
You can have grand visions for remodeling your house or getting in shape, but if there’s a fire in the kitchen, you drop everything and put it out. What choice do you have? The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time.
He offers a simple solution:
I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.
If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.
The solutions is easier said than done for most people unfortunately. We get so locked up in urgency, that we have a hard time stopping and focusing on what is important.
[...] posted an article on my EADDblog about urgency and putting out fires. I based it off of a blog post from Seth Godin on the [...]
Stephen Covey discusses urgent/important in great depth; I believe it’s in his 7 Habits book.
–Dave Charbonneau, C.E.R.