Have a look at my sketch drawing in the picture …

1. important things that are urgent
2. important things that are less urgent, but not less important
3. not so very important things that are urgent
4. unimportant things that aren’t urgent

You can put everything you have to do in one of those 4 groups. Groups 1 and 4 are the obvious ones, do stuff in 1 now, never do anything that gets into 4, easy. But the things in groups 2 and 3 could trick you in wasting your time if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t rocket science, you already know this but I think it’s a good way to visualize the choices you have to make.

It takes discipline and courage at times to focus on the tasks you put in group 2, but often they are the ones that help you grow out of hard situations. Stuff that goes into group 2 for a PM for instance could be making a detailed planning or a strong risk log, or something strategical like writing out a new process and presenting it to your own project office or to your executives.

Have a good look at what your project teams are doing, it’s the job of a PM to indicate the urgency and the importance of different things for them but also to help them make the correct assessment and maybe the drawing can help you with that when things get fuzzy (like they do).

I got a lot of things like this explained to me in far greater detail by Inge De Bruyn from De Groeipraktijk and use the advice quite a lot, they do training workshops and seminars on all kind of soft skills. This post isn’t endorse by them but I’d recommend them to you if you’d ask me.