This week we’ve been exploring how to be more productive.
At the heart of these efforts is (#1) defining our key priorities, and then (#2) planning our days to get these things done, says Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing.
Pretty simple, right?
Not so much. We say: “Well, this is great, and I’ve set my priorities, and set my time around it, and then . . . urgent things always come up!”
Whatever role we are in, chances are “unexpected issues requiring our immediate attention can certainly arise, making it hard to keep space in our calendar for priorities,” Laura writes.
But all is not lost.
“The best time to handle urgent matters is before they happen,” Laura writes. “This may seem impossible, but it only feels that way if we haven’t allocated time for the urgent and unpredictable in our schedules.”
2: One of Laura’s key strategies to deal with urgent issues is to block off time in our calendar each day to address them.
“Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, sets an hour each day for urgent matters,” she writes. He “sets it for the same time every day. This way, if urgent things come up, there is always time to fit them in without affecting the rest of his calendar.”
The one-hour time block is the same time each day, so anyone on his team who needs to speak to him urgently knows when he will be available.
“If nothing urgent comes up,” Laura notes, “this becomes his work time or a chance to check email.”
Thomas’s approach is similar to that of college professors who block off office hours each week so students can drop by to discuss their work or ask questions.
A different Google executive also blocks off time each day for urgent issues, but she intentionally does not tell her team when these hours will be.
“That way, if something comes up, she can still make room for it if needed,” Laura observes, “but she leaves it free for herself to quietly get things done if nothing urgent surfaces.”
In both cases, these executives are being proactive about creating time in their schedules to deal with urgent issues while still being able to prioritize and plan their days.
3: Another useful tactic for dealing with urgent issues is to categorize them according to their urgency and importance.
This approach harkens back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s comment back in 1954 when he said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are not urgent.”
By using concrete language, we can triage what issues warrant our attention.
We start by defining each term.
“Urgent: Activities demanding immediate attention, usually associated with achieving someone else’s goals,” Laura writes.
“Important: Activities that have an outcome that leads to us focusing on our priorities
Some issues will be urgent and important. These require specific action, including completely rearranging our schedule if necessary. “It’s worth rescheduling some meetings and/or work time because it’s both time sensitive and aligned with our priorities,” Laura writes.
If an issue is important, but not urgent, we proceed with our current schedule and add it to our Main List of issues so we can schedule time to get it done at a later date.
If an issue is urgent but not important, we can delegate it, set aside a small block of time to deal with it, or simply push it back to the other person.
When an issue is neither urgent nor important, we can feel good about not spending any time on it or delegating it to someone else.
The key learning? “Having our top priorities already defined makes it less tempting to spend time on [non-important] things,” Laura notes.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I allowing myself the permission to concentrate deeply for a few hours, or am I trapped in the belief that working longer always means achieving more?
Action: Set aside a daily window of three to four hours for focused, uninterrupted work—and accept the rest of the day’s natural chaos without guilt.