Unless I am a hermit, I have to deal with people, and it is their expectations and my responses that generally determine whether there is margin in my life, and whether I am going to be running frantically to keep up, or just getting fed up.
Over the course of time we develop and settle into patterns and means of meeting the expectations of our spouse, children, supervisors, peers, customers, suppliers, friends, social media 'friends' (acquaintances), neighbors, mentors, service providers, professional advisers, publishers and audience. There is and will always be someone with expectations of our time and attention.
Swarming expectations are complicated, accelerated, or obscured by other factors like unclear personal boundaries, the need to please others, career frustration, health and family issues, cultural misunderstanding, economic downturns, marketplace changes, and creative destruction. That last one is subtle; innovation in one field can have the effect of weakening existing systems and threatening jobs there while creating other ones in a related or different field (think Uber - or robotics). And then to top it off, we get older, the world changes, and competition arrives from new sources. We can all fill our own blanks here. It just all adds up, and we find we are are running faster to catch up to multiplied demands and it's not getting easier.
What if you could go into orbit above your life, and see things for what they truly are? I don't mean physically and geographically; I mean seeing the big view of trends, implications and the results of our choices. What would you see? Would the things clamoring for your immediate attention, which I will call the urgent, seem as important? If you could see a month into the future, what would matter? How about a year? How about a lifetime?
I think that if we can sort out the important things from the urgent, we will change the way we do things and the decisions we make. If we start asking "why?" we are doing things more often, we may start opening our eyes to the implications of our choices and make different and better ones. What is truly important is what I will look back on at the end of my life and be glad I did.
Years ago I listened to Bobb Biehl speak at a conference and he said something that I think provides a light to help discern the difference between urgent and important. He said that the human mind cannot tolerate an unanswered, profound question. That is a question that cannot be answered with a yes or no, whose answer is not immediately apparent. An example is the form of "what would happen if...?" Perhaps if we took the time to reflect on our busy lives and ask ourselves more profound questions starting with "why," we would see our way out of the short-term urgent an into more of the long-term important.