Important and Urgent

I had to reschedule a rehearsal with my students for next week, due to a scheduling conflict with our school musical, Mary Poppins, which has a fast-approaching opening night.

In approaching the situation this morning, I wrote the following note to my students, outlining the difference between IMPORTANT and URGENT.


On the difference between IMPORTANT and URGENT.

It’s easy to confuse IMPORTANT with URGENT, but sometimes things can be less URGENT while being no less IMPORTANT.

Currently, the musical is the most URGENT priority in many of our lives. That doesn’t make it more IMPORTANT than the other things like exams or sleep or family. Or Aces.

But it does make the musical more URGENT, which means sometimes we need to be flexible with other IMPORTANT things, to give precedence to the urgency.