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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

As someone pointed out, this is a variation of the Urgent/Important matrix.

I've found that there is a next step / additional dimension that can be very useful as well:

Once you have what's in the important row, ask people what they would want to work on.

Assuming everyone is qualified for the tasks, I've found that giving something urgent/important to someone who wants to work on it vs someone who doesn't DRAMATICALLY improves the odds of it getting done quickly.

This being HN, someone will say: "But what about things nobody wants to work on". Great question!

The answer is to either:

- Have everyone take turns e.g. doing support for the team on a rotation

- Make trades vs the future e.g. "I know you don't want to do this now. If you do it though, I guarantee you get first choice on what you want to work on next."

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I find it difficult to understand the opposition between Urgent and important, I could understand for example an opposition between difficult and beneficial.

But urgent and important sound somewhat like synonyms. Something urgent must be the most important.

You are right that urgency is related to value (same as important), but also to time.

One way to look at it is that urgent things are those whose value is soon going to be accelerating quite a lot (even infinitely), either up or down. Important things are things whose value is high, irrespective of rate of change.

Example: Fix the hole now or the boat sinks: urgent (currently you have a boat that is completely functional: that's going to change). Arrive to the intended port and not a wrong one: important (if you make a mistake, you may need to spend several days travelling back. Sure, the longer you keep navigating in a wrong direction the more fuel and time you lose, but it is not super-urgent).

ok this seems the most sensible - from a project management / IT viewpoint - expression of the issue.

I was going to say I still don't think I would find a x,y graph with x being urgency and y being importance useful for determining what I would work on but now I can theoreticaly see it, urgent issues that are more important get worked on sooner than urgent issues that are less important.

I do think however if someone told me that, as others having suggested here, winning a contest was urgent but 0 on importance than I would say it was also 0 on urgency.

All that said I think the graph would be not especially useful in practice, because in working on things we know the kind of urgency that determines what gets worked on and it almost forces us to prioritize issues higher.

Logins not working, people can't complete purchase, GDPR fines coming next week unless we fix.

Stuff that is urgent in almost every meaningful IT scenario is also, at the time, the most important.

To me, urgency means the time to do it is now/soon. And importance means we should do it.

Urgency and importance both affect prioritization. Something that is urgent and important should usually be done first. Something urgent and not important needs to be done soon or not at all --- and both are valid choices. Something important and not urgent is likely to be delayed, at least until it is urgent. Something neither important nor urgent may be delayed or dropped --- again, both are valid choices.

I guess I understand it in theory but I guess I am also just a different person - if something is urgent but not at all important it will always be dropped. To me that would be the only valid choice.

Sure, but what if it's urgent but only a little important.

I can't help but think that anything that is urgent but only a little important is in fact really important, because things that are a little important need to be done, and the urgent thing must be done now.

Urgent and a little important must be done now.

Urgent and unimportant must be dropped and it is a waste of time in endless meetings to even discuss it.

> Something urgent must be the most important.

Not necessarily. Imagine a scenario where the team would like to submit their project to some kind of a competition, and the submission deadline is nearing. If they submit, they could win an award that could increase the project's visibility and potentially sales; but it's not guaranteed, and the project is already doing well enough on its own.

So, that task of submitting to the competition is definitely urgent, but at best nice-to-have.

Here's a very urgent but entirely unimportant task: buy a ticket for tonight's lottery.

A couple more examples of urgent but not important:

- Buying a pumpkin for Halloween: the stores are going to sell out of pumpkins and Halloween is going to pass, so it is urgent to buy a pumpkin while there are still pumpkins.

- Commenting on a controversy on social media: very quickly, the attention will move on to the next thing and you will lose the opportunity to comment on this thing.

They are not opposite at all. The insight is that they are not synonyms either. They are just not related at all.

Based on other people's responses I'm guessing that they interpret the distinction as "time sensitive" versus "useful"

> Something urgent must be the most important.

No. Answering a ringing phone is urgent. Answering a ringing phone is not important (usually*).

Opening a certified letter from the IRS is important. Opening a certified letter from the IRS is not urgent.

Urgency communicates the time-sensitivity of a task. Importance communicates the value of a task.

* Assuming you're not a 911 dispatcher or other on-duty call-center type of employee.

>* Assuming you're not a 911 dispatcher or other on-duty call-center type of employee.

Or a programmer, or working on technical projects with some sort of scrum-like workflow in, in which case I believe an urgent issue is an issue that is important.

I believe a lot of people on HN fall into one of those two groups.

Sure theoretically you can still come up with issues that are urgent but not as important as less urgent issues but not in a way that really fits how the terms are used in a lot of our works.

It's important that we transition off the platform in a year or we will pay 50 thousand dollars a month in fines, but it's urgent we solve the login issue.

Yeah sure but we're going to work on the urgent issue because right now, in this moment in time, the urgent issue is more important than the issue that has a year to be fixed.

Everyone's given you examples of urgent/unimportant. Here's an example of Important/not-urgent:

You are successfully selling a product at a profit. You have identified an inefficiency in how the product is made; if you fix it, you increase your net margins by 50%.

That's super important, as you're leaving a lot of money on the table! However, whether that inefficiency is fixed immediately or somewhere down the road makes little difference in terms of the payout once it is fixed.

right if you fix that problem 5 years down the road - wait a second, that means we lose a lot of money?!?

It means you make a lot less money. Urgent usually implies a nonlinearity in the cost of not doing it. Important means a large absolute cost of not doing it.

Exercise is important. It's never(?) urgent.

Something can be urgent, but it doesn't matter if you don't do it.

Something can be important but not urgent - it doesn't matter if you do it later, but it's important that you do it at some point (but you maybe don't need to do it right away).

Something can be urgent and important - if you don't do it now, bad stuff will happen.

"Important (but not Urgent)" is most people's weak quadrant.

All those biggish things that you want to do some day, that you need to do some day, that might change your life... BUT right now (for looong values of "right now") there's something else to do.

This is where you want to break down hazy targets into multiple more-concrete steps, so that you can opportunistically make piecewise progress.

Exercising today is important, because it contributes to my long-term goals, but it isn’t urgent – I can do it this morning, tonight, or even delay it a few days if need be.

Buying food for dinner tonight is urgent, because without it I can’t eat tonight. It’s not important, however, in that even in the worst-case scenario where I miss a meal, nothing bad happens.

Paying my rent is both important and urgent, in that it’s time-sensitive and has substantial consequences if I fail to do so.

I struggled with this for years (decades, actually) and used similar reasoning as the sibling comments. And it doesn’t work.

Funnily enough the solution is very simple, but you need to have a list of goals you want to reach. Everything that helps you get closer to fulfilling your goals is important, everything else is unimportant.

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