From Firefighting to Visionary: How to Stop Letting Urgency Control Your Business

What’s at the top of your priority list? And is that thing top-of-list because it’s important? Or is it there because it’s urgent? As the owner and visionary of a business, if you find yourself dedicating more time to the urgent than the important, that's your cue to rebalance.

But sometimes, everything feels both important and urgent! We need a way to empirically determine if it’s time to refocus. The good news is that you don’t have to decide which tasks are important and which are urgent. Instead, you should evaluate the outcomes of your time spent.

Are you making impaired decisions?

Do you often find yourself committing to a decision, only to later wish you had gone a different direction? Decisions we make when we're healthy and centered are far different than reactive decisions. Urgency leads to these reactive decisions and often leaves us feeling unsatisfied when the dust settles.

That isn’t to say urgent decisions don’t need to be made, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Urgent decisions are made every day, but they shouldn’t require huge investments of time. 

Urgent questions should be addressed by systems and standards determined before those decisions arise. Vision, core values, contingency plans and more can help us efficiently make such decisions. Trusted advisors can be great sounding boards when the path is still unclear.

Lost in the weeds or focused on the big picture?

If your time is consumed by the minutiae of day-to-day operations, you won't find the space to fly up to a 30,000 foot view. You and your business exist in a bigger, broader environment and it’s up to you to know what’s happening in that environment.

Those systems and standards we developed for urgent decisions should also guide day-to-day operations without your involvement. As the visionary of a business, your time and efforts belong elsewhere. Your time and efforts belong to the important, not the urgent or the day-to-day.

Naturally, this requires a capable Operations Leader that can serve as your alter-ego for these functions. Remember, we’re focused on your identity and beliefs – what Dan Sullivan refers to as “who not how” instead of tactics and skills.

Just by virtue of focusing on urgent instead of important, you don't have enough time for the reflection and innovation that is necessary to be a good visionary. Have you realized that you're not getting enough time to think big? Maybe you recently made a decision and wish you would have realized its broader impacts. Or perhaps you missed out on a major shift in your industry because you’re focused internally. 

The role of the visionary is to drive the business forward through expansive thinking and new ideas. If you haven’t developed an ecosystem which fosters this kind of thinking, your business will stagnate. That is to say, spending too much time on the urgent and not enough on the important may lead to a lack of things to spend your time on at all.

Conclusion:

You’ve asked yourself a lot of questions today and you may not be happy with all your answers. If that’s the case, you might be feeling burned out by the day-to-day operations of your business. You're probably overwhelmed and you're probably wondering how you found yourself in this position. That isn't the life you wanted for yourself when you decided to start your own business, but that can change! Your focus should be on the important, not the urgent. Identifying the need to refocus is the first step.

Realize you need to refocus? Looking for guidance? Check out our mini-workshop (the first of many to come on a variety of topics) to help you with your shift in identity:  Unlock "The Friday Effect": Achieve Business Growth & Personal Freedom in Just 3 Steps