KEEPING PERSPECTIVE
I’ve missed my deadline again.
Well, my personal one anyway, but I think I have a pretty good excuse. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been in the United States visiting family and friends, and my 10-hour return flight from San Francisco landed in London two hours after The Voice editors like to start working on the next issue.
Most weeks, that’s when I get my column to them. They don’t really need it until Monday morning, but meeting my Friday target allows them to layout this piece before more urgent news and sports stories come in, and it also allows me to relax over the weekend.
I’ve made that confession because it leads into my ongoing struggle to see the difference between important things and urgent things… and then keep them in perspective. The first bit was highlighted by my recent trip, and the second by today’s writing effort.
As you may have guessed, I didn’t get very far with my writing before I left the States, but that was because I had more important things to do; mainly, focusing on family, so I’m happy I got that right. But a big part of the reason that was so important was that I had neglected to visit some of them for nearly five years.
Other things kept getting in the way. I can’t remember what they were now, so they probably weren’t very important, but I know many of them seemed to be urgent at the time. And unfortunately, getting sidetracked for so long resulted in me failing to see my brother-in-law for four years before he died.
So, the writing didn’t seem terribly important while I was in the States, even though meeting my deadline did seem urgent for a few hours the morning before I left. But I got over that and spent most of the day focusing on my sister Kim instead. And when I finally got around to writing today, the first thing I did was delete the distracted rubbish I’d written that morning.
Meeting The Voice Monday deadline, however, is important to both them and to me, so getting stuck in today should have been fairly easy… but it wasn’t. That’s because I kept noticing things around the house that needed my attention after more than a week away. Unpacking, doing the laundry, watering the tomatoes, trying to repair the tumble dryer.
Of course, none of those things was truly important since all of them could have waited another day… especially the dryer but, for some reason, they all seemed urgent. And I’m afraid to say, the urgent won out over the important once again and I actually did the first three and tried to do the fourth before I sat down to write.
So, I’m not going to try to share any tricks to help you recognise the difference between important things that have lasting value, and minor problems that seem to urgently require our attention as soon as they pop up. I still haven’t got that down. But I’m going to work on that skill because I definitely believe it’s important.