Important

For those who are not familiar with the advise of Stephen Covey, I may well take this opportunity to explain a bit.

The idea is simple: Everything we got to handle in our life could be classified into four groups - urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. In his books, Covey put them into a 2 × 2 Time Management Matrix.

The very idea of this classification is, we should work hard on important subjects although they are not urgent, and avoid the happening of urgent but unimportant matters. (In fact, we should also prevent the development of any urgent and important problem - for obvious reasons.)

You may wonder: How could one distinguish urgent matters from important ones? In reality, most of us do not have any problem in telling the difference of the two. The real difficulty is how to motivate yourself and work on important matters although they are not yet urgent.

I have no good answer either.