Why You Need a Daily Prioritization Meeting
We live in a culture of urgency, constantly throwing our emotional energy into the latest public scandal, emergency, or cat video. Most of us work in always-switched-on companies where everything feels urgent. Call backs, emails, and meetings are wrought with peak energy. How quickly do you expect a response to an email or changes to a report?
The media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff describes his concept of “present shock” as “one big now… where everything is happening so fast it may as well be simultaneous.” He says the incoming barrage of information has degraded our ability to create long-term plans, and instead sets us up to react, react, react.
“The Principle of Priority states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first.” ― Steven Pressfield,The War of Art
Urgency is a great motivator, but a flimsy one. The problem with urgency is that no one can remember what’s really important, so we spend too much time and energy on activities that don’t matter.
