Living Life by Design

In the words of author J.K. Rowling’s Albus Dumbledore, “Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.”

Urgent things act on us; they compete for our attention and insist on a response. Consider the horrific example of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, bound from New York to Miami on Dec. 29, 1972. The jumbo jet had a full load of holiday passengers as it began its final descent toward the Miami International Airport. When the crew pulled the handle to lower the landing gear, one of the lights failed to turn green.

In this case, the nose-gear light had remained off, meaning that either the nose wheel hadn’t safely come down and locked into place, or that the bulb itself had burned out. The pilot radioed the control tower: “Well, ah, tower, this is Eastern 401. It looks like we’re gonna have to circle; we don’t have a light on our nose gear yet.”

The tower directed the plane to change its approach and climb back to two thousand feet. They set the autopilot to a looping race-track pattern and turned their attention to the light. The captain and the first officer attempted to replace the bulb, but discovered that the cover had jammed. After working unsuccessfully to get it out, the engineer joined in, but likewise couldn’t get the light to budge.

The copilot suggested they use a handkerchief to get a better grip, but whatever they ended up trying didn’t help. The engineer finally suggested pliers, but warned that if they forced it, they could end up breaking the mechanism. The crew kept at it, throwing out expletives as they struggled to get the light bulb out and replaced with another.

The cockpit voice recorder captured the second officer next, “We did something to the altitude.”

“What?” the captain replied, confused.

“We’re still at two thousand feet, right?” the copilot asked.

The captain then uttered his last words: “Hey, what’s happening here?”

The microphone captured the sounds of the airliner flying itself into the Everglades, taking the lives of 101 passengers and crew.

The final report cited pilot error as the cause of the crash, stating that “the failure of the flight crew to monitor the flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction … distracted the crew’s attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed.”

While this example is extreme, solving the problem of the landing gear light was certainly urgent. Landing the airplane safely, however, was of paramount importance. Unfortunately, in their zeal to address the urgent, the crew got distracted and unintentionally lost sight of what mattered most.

In the workplace, urgencies tend to be easy to identify, like picking up the phone, answering a text or clicking an email. But, as the example of Flight 401 illustrates, the tendency to confuse what’s urgent with what’s important can have long-standing consequences. Like the next ball being served up to us by the pinball machine, it’s a constant press of urgencies that act on us: They vie for our immediate intention.

By contrast, important things often require us to act on them. Important things are those that contribute to our values and align to our highest goals. They are intentional and long-term rather than ad hoc and transitory. In almost all cases, they include important relationships.

Set goals that matter.

Reflect on what’s important to you at the deepest and most meaningful levels. Be specific. This process is how a GPS works — we need to identify a destination first to calculate which roads will get us there most directly. The more exact the address, the better the chance we’ll arrive. Goals that matter are those that are typically centered on strengthening relationships, planning for the future, and personal improvement.

Choose your weekly priorities carefully.

Rather than just a to-do list, think about which activities will have the greatest impact on your relationships and the outcomes you care most about. Consider which actions would build trust, make work easier for people, help you be more patient in your dealings with others, or create value for your customers. Try thinking about your weekly calendar as rows of empty containers, each limited by a finite amount of space (i.e., time). People often kid themselves into believing they can fit everything in — all the numerous small and urgent tasks along with the fewer, more valuable and important ones. We tend to focus on the quick wins first, shoving as many urgent tasks into our limited containers as we can.

And although the containers are full, they’re not often filled with meaningful accomplishments. But, here’s the problem: Once these limited spaces fill up with urgencies, the important things naturally fall by the wayside. If we thoughtfully identify and schedule the most important things first (the priorities that require us to act on them rather than react to them), what falls by the wayside are the urgent, less important things.

Excerpt from an article by Todd Davis, November 2, 2017.                                                                                                                                     https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/303964 [entrepreneur.com]