How to Determine What's Important and What Isn't

The average business professional is presented with dozens of new tasks and requests on a daily basis. Only some of these items are truly important; the others often get in the way of the more important tasks. Learning how to determine what's important and what isn't is an essential skill that every business professional must learn in order to maintain productivity and achieve company goals.

How does a business professional determine what's important and what isn't important? Determining importance involves identifying whether the item under consideration helps the company achieve its goals. For example, meeting with a team member to review a project draft helps the company achieve its goal of completing the project. However, taking time to respond to an emailed survey from a company vendor does not help the company directly achieve a goal.

Often, business professionals quickly learn that there are more important tasks than they have time to complete. This is where learning how to effectively delegate becomes crucial. Any business member at the managerial level should be delegating many important tasks to direct reports and other team members to ensure that what's important gets done. Even business professionals below the managerial level often have the power to delegate tasks to administrative assistants and other office staff.

Stephen Covey, author of the famous business book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," offers business professionals a matrix to help determine what's important and what isn't. Forbes describes this matrix, often called "the important-urgent matrix," as the most significant part of Covey's book.

The important-urgent matrix is a two-by-two grid. The horizontal axis is labeled "Urgent" and "Not Urgent" and the vertical axis is labeled "Important" and "Not Important." This means that each task falls into one of four quadrants: "Important and Urgent," "Important and Not Urgent," "Not Important and Urgent" and "Not Important and Not Urgent."

Business professionals determine what's important by filing each new task into its respective grid. Answering a vendor survey is "Not Important and Not Urgent." Meeting with a colleague to review a report that must be presented to Board members that afternoon is "Important and Urgent." Answering a phone call is urgent, but may or may not be important depending on who is on the other end of the line.

Using the important-urgent matrix helps business professionals determine what's important and helps them devote their efforts to both the important and urgent tasks, such as completing a report before an afternoon deadline, as well as the important but not urgent tasks, such as planning professional development opportunities for direct reports. It also helps business professionals avoid tasks that are neither important nor urgent.

Learning what's important and what isn't important is a key part of building a career as a business professional. Determining importance involves associating each item or task with a larger company goal and eliminating tasks that are neither important nor urgent. Delegating tasks helps business professionals get all of the important jobs done.

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