In life there are important things and there are urgent things.
I’ve heard that some people struggle with letting the urgent take over their lives. I can’t believe you weak people struggle with that! If you were like me…a rock of intentionality and eye-of-the-tiger discipline, you would never deal with that.
One of the tips in Scott Belsky’s book Making Ideas Happen is to create two to-do lists. One for the urgent items and another for important ones. 
Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete agains the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve different periods of time to focus on each.
For me it’s a matter of stewardship of my time. I’m gonna try this tip and rearrange my process of planning and see how it goes. Let me know if it works for you.
Photo courtesy of Noca
Other LTI posts kinda like this one:
I’ve just started really getting on top of my to-do’s in the two categories, but don’t have the differentiation between the urgent and important. They are all lumped together. I’ve been finding even defining what my to-do’s clearly are requires a lot of effort. Does remind me that so much of “making ideas happen”, at least for me, requires a lot of concentrated thinking on the front end.
I’ll have to get this book for our office and pass it around after I’ve read it. Then we can all be rocks of intentionality.
I used to think I could just show up for this job. Now I’m realizing how much of my time needs to be in focused thought on the priorities.
There’s a lot in this book. It’s a slow read for me if I try to digest it at all.