June 5, 2011
I sometimes get comments from people just learning the MYN system that essentially state this: “The juice of what we do at work is in our most important items; so shouldn’t we be focusing on our goal-based important items in MYN and not focus so much on urgency?”
Well, to answer that, I usually tell them a story that goes like this: When I teach a seminar or give a speech, often the first thing I ask to the crowd is “How many of you have been trained to focus first on your most important work?” and nearly half the room raises their hands. I then ask “So how’s it going? How many of you are succeeding at that?” Almost no hands stay up. When I ask for individuals to explain why, they almost invariably state that they are spending too much time putting out fires and so they cannot get to their important items.
And that’s exactly the answer to the question of why we focus on urgency in MYN. We focus on urgency because out-of-control urgency is what prevents us from focusing on our important work. I assert that we need to get urgency under control first so that we have the time and composure to shift into our important work. That’s exactly what MYN does.
In fact, any to-do list that uses “Importance” as the primary prioritization approach is doomed to failure. Why? Because those systems result in a list with an overloaded and overflowing High priority section; too many items end up marked as very important. Then, if everything is important, nothing really is, and the list becomes useless.
Why does this happen?
The problem is this: there is almost always some way to measure a task as being important. Here is a quick brainstorm of several different ways a task can be labeled as having high importance.
- It might be important in time, i.e. urgent (this is the sole MYN criteria)
- it might be important for your career
- it might lead in the direction of one of your important goals
- it might match one of your important values
- it might have a long-term impact if not attended to
- It might be good for your health
- it might be fun
- it might be something you have put off a long time
- it might be something that makes you feel guilty
- it might be something that inspires you
- it might be something you feel responsible for
- it might seem morally correct
- It might be required by someone
- it might be important to someone you care about
- It might be important to your boss
- It might be important to your company
- it might be something someone is angry about it
I could go on and on.
The problem is, nearly any task can be labeled important based on one of these measures. Asking yourself “is this important” will yield a “yes” answer to way too many tasks. So we tend to put a lot of things in the important category, the High priority.
But that just can’t work. We cannot manage our work when all of our tasks are in the high priority section.
And if we attempt to trim the list, it’s hard to do. And then if we force a trim, we randomly eliminate tasks with no clear reason, and then we lose faith that the tasks remaining on the list really do represent what we really need to focus on. And we stop using the list.
And finally, in the heat of the business day, when we come to all these important items on the list, we just skip over them—they don’t help reduce our anxiety about getting ahead of our current fires, so we move on to things that do. Since the important things do not get done, we give up on any list that emphasizes them.
The beauty of the MYN system is that it uses one and only one of the above criteria as a means for identifying what goes into each priority: urgency. There is no confusion—you simply have to ask yourself the question: Is it is absolutely positively due today? If so, then you put it in Critical Now section. If you want it in the next week or so, it goes in the Opportunity Now section. If the answer is it can wait over ten days, it goes in the Over the Horizon section.
This unequivocal criteria is the main reason this to-do list is so simple and so usable. And the fact that it keeps the high priority section from overflowing gives you faith in the list. It’s one of the main reasons why so many people are successful with the MYN system and say it is the first to-do list system that has ever worked for them.
Again, the idea is once you start using the MYN system, your urgency will come under control, and you can now start to focus on your lower-urgency but very important tasks. I spend a little bit of time every morning using MYN to make sure my urgent tasks are under control. I then take a deep breath and a sigh of relief, and switch over to my more significant but less-urgent work. It feels great because I know there is nothing urgent that is about to bite me—I have those under control. In that relaxed and more creative state I can do much better work on my significant things. I encourage you to do the same.
So, once you have MYN working, how do you list and focus on these less urgent but more important tasks? See the write-up on Significant Outcomes on page 140 of the new third edition of the Outlook book. Or on page 96 of the 2010 Master Your Workday Now book. Also read about Intrinsic Importance on page 266 of the new third edition of the Outlook book. Or on page 53 of the 2010 Master Your Workday Now book.
Michael
