Urgent/Important Principle identifies which tasks and activities you should focus on and which you should delegate or ignore.

1. List all your tasks and projects.
2. Divide your tasks into important and urgent. Important activities have an outcome that leads to achieving your goals. Urgent activities demand immediate attention and are associated with achieving someone else’s goals, they demand attention because consequences are immediate.
3. Put them in one of the four categories.
I. Important and urgent – leave some free time in your schedule to handle those activities and look for patterns within. Avoid leftover tasks by better planning ahead.
II. Important but not urgent – they help to achieve goals, ensure you have plenty of time for these.
III. Not important but urgent – they prevent you from achieving your goals, can you reschedule or arrange a regular time to do them?
IV. Not important and not urgent – distracting and doesn’t contribute to goals, avoid them if possible.