Urgent VERSES Important
Below is what is an Urgent-Important Grid I made. I discovered this concept years ago and it has helped me prioritize my to-do list. If you can put what you are doing or want to do into each of these four squares you are well on your way to analyzing where your time is going and what you need to do to change things up. I found it to be a very eye-opening exercise.
You can apply this chart to your decluttering projects. How many of us wait until our clutter becomes an urgent issue before we deal with it?
Say a relative calls and says they will be visiting you and staying in your home. Now that job of decluttering your guest room has suddenly moved from the not urgent but important square to the urgent and important square. When this happens we are motivated to begin the decluttering project. Otherwise, we could wait for years to declutter the guest room. Now you drop all the things that are not urgent and start to work on getting ready for your guests. Sometimes we even drop the important but not urgent things like drinking eight glasses of water a day or taking a walk so we can get the job done. We become hyperfocused on something we have not been focusing on for a long time.
The key is to be balanced. If we schedule in the walk (not urgent/important) and the decluttering project (not urgent/important), we can still get both done. It takes some planning, but it can be done.
I hope that the above grid can help you start getting things that are important to you done.
Try putting things you do or want to do in the different squares.
It is only then that you will see where your time is going and you can then begin to do something about it.
A great book on this subject is Tyranny of the Urgent by Charles E. Hummel. I got it on Kindle for only