Urgent Versus Important And What That Means For Your Marketing
Over the past two years, many water and wastewater equipment companies have embraced content marketing and started investing in building their brand through publishing. But many have not. The most common excuse for not taking the first step is that there are more urgent business needs to attend to. These urgent needs not only delay the implementation of brand publishing but in many cases, delay even the consideration of a content marketing strategy. Unfortunately for many, those “urgent things” continue to hold up their business and continue being urgent for weeks, months and even years.
Many business owners confuse urgent with important but there is a real distinction between the two concepts. What is important for a business is to grow, consistently and over time. What is urgent is the series of short term tasks that need to be accomplished to keep the business growing. Unfortunately for many businesses, it’s easy for the urgent tasks to become untethered from the important goal. And instead of aiding growth, they distract and ultimately prevent it.
Everything that occurs at your company can be plotted along the axes of urgent and important. Urgent tasks are perceived to need immediate attention. Important tasks once completed add significant value to your organization. The key point is that tasks can be one or the other, both or neither urgent nor important.
Neither Urgent Nor Important
These tasks simply occupy our time but don’t add value to our organizations. However, most of us spend a larger portion of our day than we would like to admit on these seemingly “must do” activities. You know what these are and can often identify them but find it difficult to stay away from them as they have become routine.
Urgent
"Urgent" tasks scream out for your time and attention but don’t necessarily add value. Some examples of this are employees who ask the same question over and over again, meetings that don’t produce results and my personal favorite, e-mails. We often take these on as a way of “cleaning out the in-box” before we can move on to anything else.
Urgent and Important
There are quite a few things that fall into the "urgent and important" category. Since they need your attention immediately AND also bring value to your business, they should be prioritized. All things client-related, sales-related or finance-related most often fall within this bucket.
Important
Tasks that are most overlooked in many businesses are the "important" but not necessarily "urgent" ones. These tasks can include exploring a new marketing avenue, a new sales tracking software, vetting a new market etc. There is no deadline for these things but they could mean success or failure for your company in the near future.
Perhaps no one is screaming for you to try a different marketing approach but if the one you have been using for the past twenty or thirty years without strategic review is no longer working, you may wish to deprioritize some of the urgent issues on your plate and spend some time strategizing on an important one. If you can invest the time in this type of important task, you’re business will be better off for it.
Let’s stop wasting time on things that don’t improve our business and start working on those that will make an impact. Make sure whatever you are working on is IMPORTANT and the rest should fall into place.
Image credit: "Apple Watch Sport," LWYang © 2015, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/