Many people have an unfair complaint that they do not get enough time to do a lot of stuff that they would love to do. Now, when the President of a country says that, you would agree and say, “that’s a busy man”, but when someone among your friends says that, it doesn’t mean that he has very little time; it’s just that he has very little time management skills.

We have a tendency to get confused between urgent work and important work. When faced with a situation, where you have to choose between a task, which needs to be taken care of urgently, and a task that we understand is very important, we normally are caught unawares trying to figure out what is the priority here.

Urgent tasks like taking printouts or forwarding emails could take your attention and take the focus off from important things. Similarly, saying that you are busy with an important meeting when your boss is waiting on the line to have a conversation with you is also not a pleasant priority to have.

Learning how to compartmentalize these two different sorts of work into our daily routine, so that our urgent tasks do not overlap with important ones and vice versa is the core of time management concepts.