Dr Stephen Covey came up with a groundbreaking concept in his book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", and it has provided a vocabulary that has helped people understand the essential differentiation between urgent and important.
The concept is simple. Tasks that you carry out are either important or not important and urgent or not urgent. Before looking at the way that this concept can be used, it makes sense to spend a moment defining the terms. These may seem obvious, but I get a lot of questions about how to determine whether things are important or unimportant.
Urgent is one of the most movable of all concepts. Whether things are urgent often depends upon whether you allow them to be urgent or not. This depends upon setting expectations, personal management and a whole variety of other things that are discussed elsewhere.
Not Urgent is easy to define. There is no time pressure, and there is no apparent or obvious penalty for not getting the task done today. If you’ve read this far, you’ll know that categorizing things this way can be the most expensive mistake of all!
Important is also easy enough to define. These are things that are clearly worth our time and merit our attention. They need to get done, and will impact the value of what we accomplish.
Not Important is a little harder to define. My definition is that these are tasks that are below your pay grade. They may be important at some level, it's just not important that you do them.
Every task in your day can be ranked and categorized by using the boxes on this grid:

Urgent and Important: Top left contains things that are both urgent and important. This doesn't represent a Strategic Time Management problem, as these are things that need to get done. They are important and because they are urgent they are going to get taken care of.
Urgent and Not Important: Top right contains things that are urgent and calling out for attention, but they are not important for you to do. "Not Important" means, they are below your pay grade and do not belong in your day. They are urgent and call for attention, but not yours.
Not Urgent and Not Important: Bottom right finds us spending our time is on things that are neither urgent or important. These things have somehow found their way into our day and we tend to work on them for the easy, and often fictitious, view of progress that crossing them off our list provides.
Not Urgent and Important: Bottom left is the key quadrant in The Time Edge. In this box lie the key activities that we should be doing that will make a difference in our business. Unfortunately we get to them last because we are driven by The Tyranny of The Urgent, and this box is where we need to spend more time.
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