Determining what’s important in the moment is a key to the unlocking the door to an enjoyable life.

As we mentioned in the last post,  importance and urgency can be arranged to form a matrix.  This matrix can be used to understand how we need to focus our attention, attitude and actions to create the vision we have for our lives.

As you can see in the graphic below, it is up to us to focus our attention and resources in the second quadrant of the matrix when we are not dealing with the important urgent matters of quadrant one.  It’s also up to us to understand what’s important in our lives and the relationship of those things with the urgency of our present situation.  Once we have our current situation managed, we can look beyond our immediate needs to make sure our present actions take us along the path we decide is important in our lives.

Importance is derived from knowing what we truly want to create in our lives.  Having a vision of our future enables us to put matters in their place.  The crappy attitudes at work find context when we know we have to stay on the job to achieve a goal.  We can survive the muck, mire and arduous nature of our daily affairs when we know our activities relate to the purpose we decide is important.  Those things not related to our purposes fall into unimportance.  If something is not urgent and unimportant, it is our responsibility to let it go.

We are accountable to ourselves to focus on what’s important.