Steven Covey was an educator and author, probably best known for his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He covered a lot of ground in that book, but there’s one element that I think is more important than any other. Covey wrote about urgency and importance, and specifically about how any task on your plate can be both of those things, just one of them, or neither of them. If you have more tasks on your plate than you have time in your day, it’s really important to know exactly where each one fits in terms of importance and urgency. 

The combination of urgency and importance yields four possibilities. Something can be urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or neither urgent nor important. It’s pretty obvious, I think, that anything that’s urgent and important should sit at the top of your priority list. But what about something that’s important but not urgent? I hope you’ll see that any task in this category should sit lower on your priority list. It needs to be done, but it doesn’t need to be done now. And I’m sure you see that something that’s neither urgent nor important should sit at the very bottom of your priority list. (I’m sure you see it, but I’m not sure you really embrace it. More on that to follow.)

The real killer for most printing salespeople is the things that are urgent but not important, although in this case, “urgent” may not be quite the right word. Let’s substitute a word one of my clients like to use—“shiny”—as in they are easily distracted by shiny things.