Measuring Importance

I'm sure we're almost all familiar with the Urgent versus Important paradigm that has helped numerous professionals and students manage their time and energy. It's a very useful tool, and one that I rely on very heavily during the fall and spring terms.

However, I find it isn't as helpful when considering my summer activities, or my professional trajectory, in general. Over the summer, when there are no class or committee meetings to prepare for, everything is important and almost nothing is urgent. Similarly, when I look at the time I have each semester or each year to spend on research projects and writing, the urgent items (grading, answering e-mail) is already scheduled. The problem I run into is choosing between important things.

I ran into this same problem this week, when I took some time (during Spring Break, grumble grumble) to figure out my goals and commitments for the summer. I needed a way to distinguish between what I absolutely had to accomplish, what I wanted to make progress on, and what I wanted to dream about should I have the time. I needed to think through what my job requires me to do (preparing classes, setting up initiatives for my department) and what is good for me to do (attend conferences, stay up-to-date on journals, write). Basically, I needed to add a third dimension to the urgent-important matrix.

Here's what I came up with:

This chart makes use of two axes that separately evaluate whether a project is important for my job (i.e., conducting the business of my classes, department, university) or is important for me (i.e., promoting my own development and professional impact). So, for example, in "Essential" I have preparing my fall courses and developing my department's assessment plan. In "Need to Make Progress" I have finding a grant for my department to apply to. In "Need to Pursue," I have learning some cosmology. In "Nice to Do," I have working on the second edition of my aviation physics textbook.

Will this schema work? We'll have to see how the summer goes...