We had plans to meet someone on Friday afternoon, but during the course of the afternoon we got a message from her saying that there was a crisis at work and she wasn’t going to be able to make it.

I often receive this excuse from people who can’t make it to a coaching session – “there’s a crisis I have to deal with this morning, can we reschedule?”

In the case of Friday afternoon, the person we were scheduled to meet is a case worker with Barnardo’s, so the crisis that she was dealing with probably involved a child that needed to be removed from their home to ensure their safety.  It is likely that it really was a crisis.

But I wonder how often my coaching clients are truly dealing with a crisis?  NowI know that things come up that are urgent, and need attention, and require people to reschedule – I know that an urgent request from the Minister’s office often requires immediate attention – but a crisis?  Really?

When I worked as a senior executive in the public service, I found the constant demands on my time to be quite stressful.  Having an open-door policy for my team at work was very important to me, but it also meant that sometimes I was swamped and my team would come to my door looking for answers to questions or help with a task.

It took me a while to work out that whenever someone came to my office, I was making the assumption that their question was both urgent and important, and needed my immediate attention.  Once I realised this, I implemented a triage system.  If I was busy on another task, I would ask my team-member to rate on a scale of 1-10, how urgent the issue was and how important it was.  And sometimes the answers showed that this issue did need my immediate attention.  But most of the time, the answers surprised me – they often said something like “oh, it’s probably only a 5 or a 6 – we can deal with it this afternoon if you like”.  It had an amazing effect on not only my stress levels, but also on their stress levels, as they realised that the issue was not as important or urgent as they were relating to it.

There was even one memorable day when my husband was away, and my daughter had some end of year concert which it was important for her that I attended, and I received a request from the Minister’s office via the normal channels for a brief to be provided by the end of the day.  I bit the bullet and phoned my contact at the Minister’s office to ask whether it would be okay if I provided the brief first thing the next morning, rather than by the end of the day.  Again, the answer took me by surprise “That would be fine – the Minister won’t look at it until about 9am tomorrow anyway”.

Stephen Covey articulated a good strategy to deal with prioritising tasks in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.  He suggested categorising work tasks into one of four quadrants along two axes – Urgent vs Not Urgent and Important vs Not Important.  The theory is that sometimes things that are “urgent but not important” tend to get more attention than those items that are “important but not urgent”.  The things that tend to fall into this last category are things like planning, strategic thinking, professional development, relationship-building – things that will pay off in the long run, and ultimately make us better performers and free up time.

The trick is trying to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with things that are urgent but not necessarily important.  Strategies like those outlined above can help – question both your own assumptions and those of others about how urgent and important it is, as people often confuse the two.  Or are there other options?  Can you delegate, delay, do it a different way, or even not do it at all?

Our habit of referring to things as a crisis may have the impact of increasing our stress levels when it’s not really justified, and skew our view of what is urgent and important.

How much time do you spend on urgent things, as the cost of some things that are more important in the long run?  What can you do to re-prioritise some of the less important things which are taking up your precious time?