Founder of personal productivity blog www.lifehacker.com and author of 'Upgrade Your Life - The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better', Gina Trapani considers the quandary we are all familiar with: managing the constant stream of firefighting, immediate urgent tasks that have to be done NOW, while also giving attention proactively to the projects that you know to be strategically important, but that do not have immediate urgency.

With a nod to Stephen Covey's work "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," she notes that we tend to spend far too much time in the arena of "Urgent, but not Important," where we lurch from crisis to crisis, while matters that are "Important but not Urgent", when neglected, tend to move spontaneously to being "Important AND Urgent."

The danger of staying busy to feel needed

Because urgent tasks are usually short-term and keep us busy, Trapani argues that we gravitate to them in part because we get a secondary gain of adrenaline rush and feeling needed. (If we're busy people, then we must be important people...) But at the end of yet another day of endless firefighting and responsive urgency we feel wrung out and disheartened by the list of important tasks we have still not made headway with.

Do you recognise the scenario?!

Important work moves you towards your business goals

Paradoxically, important work can seem tedious and challenging in a different way, often because it is indeed hard work and demands stringent thinking and attention. There is rarely a quick pay-off. Yet if you do not have a clearly thought-through structure within which to make decisions and take action, you are far less likely to succeed, either at a personal or business level.

So what can you do to help this dilemma?

Trapani identifies several practical things you can do to bring more balance into your working agenda. She also acknowledges that if you work in an environment where frenzied busyness and constant urgency is regarded as good, then it takes real personal determination and courage. But just recognising the distinction between urgent and important tasks is helpful - if in doubt, stop for a moment, stand back and consider where you are giving your energy.

1. Free up mental RAM
   Short term memory is like mental RAM, and is limited. So when you find yourself with lots of thoughts, worries and too-much-to-do running through your mind, you will feel distracted and overwhelmed. The only way to relieve this constant mental and emotional overload is to have systems to manage it. One idea she suggests is to use technology to send messages and reminders to your future self.

2. Identify 3 Important tasks to work on each day
   Another idea is to write down just three things that will contribute to something important and keep them visible. Give yourself specific time when you will work on these and be clear about why this is important for your future success.

3. Turn off your Email!
   It takes great discipline, but give yourself time without the constant interruption of email and the temptation of the web. Allow an hour to work on your important task undisturbed by the ambush of electronic demands on you.

4. Set up a weekly meeting with yourself
   This can be either alone or with a coach - but it must be treated with the same respect you would give to a meeting with your boss. Use this time to review what you have achieved in the past week and what is important to work on in the week to come, clarifying what it means in moving you towards your highest business outcomes. Building this habit, Trapani says, is one of the most useful ways to be sure you are being mindful about how you're spending your time.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are far more than our abilities."