Sort tasks by urgency against importance; the trap is that urgency captures attention that importance deserves.
Attributed to Eisenhower via a 1954 speech quoting an unnamed college president. The urgent-unimportant quadrant is where most organisational time goes and where almost none of the value is.
In practice
- A department spends every morning on inbound requests and never on the process redesign that would end most of them.
- A householder deals with post, calls and errands all week and never books the boiler service that would prevent the emergency.