January President's Corner (continued)
I have noticed a pattern in my unmet goals, which is that they tend to be the ones without any specific deadline. These deadline-free goals are not lacking in importance. On the contrary - some of these goals are among my most important. Some are about cultivating relationships, which are vital in Extension. Others are what I refer to as program infrastructure projects. They include things like writing new publications to support our programs; developing new workshops and curriculum; needs assessments and other research projects to inform our program delivery; and creating better data management systems for faster access to key program metrics and better reporting. These are investments that allow for program growth, audience expansion, improved content delivery, time-saving efficiency, and, ultimately, greater impacts.
These important but deadline-free goals seem to always get overshadowed by something more urgent. There’s a workshop tomorrow. There’s a deadline at 5:00 to submit something. There’s a meeting with county commissioners. The administration wants a report. The phone rings. There are 100 unread emails in the inbox. All of these things clamor for our attention and can keep us fully occupied.
Author Charles Hummel addressed this problem in the late 1960s with his book Tyranny of the Urgent. Hummel recognized this tendency for the urgent to overshadow the important such that things that are important but not urgent never get done. Twenty years later, Steven Covey further addressed this issue in his landmark book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey illustrates an urgency and importance matrix with four quadrants: urgent and important; non-urgent and important; urgent and unimportant; and non-urgent and unimportant. Covey makes the case that we spend too much time on things that are urgent but unimportant or even non-urgent and unimportant at the expense of that which is important but not urgent.
For me, perfectionism sometimes gets me stuck in something that is not important. I let perfect be the enemy of good. I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to implement one more little tweak to make it a tiny bit more perfect. I want to be clear that I am not advocating for mediocrity in our work. Rather, I’m thinking of tedious minutia that are unlikely to be noticed by or a benefit to anyone and, as such, really do not matter. When these things stop us from getting important work into the done column, opportunities are missed, and impacts are foregone.
Another thing I suffer from is procrastination, as I am sure many of you do as well. For me, this may be related to perfectionism. I want conditions to be perfect before I undertake one of my important but not urgent tasks. I want to get to all those emails awaiting responses and all other urgent matters wrapped up so that they will not distract me, and I can be in the perfect frame of mind. Of course, as Extension professionals, we will never have that clean slate where all urgent matters have been dealt with. There will always be a steady stream of emails and demands on our time. I can end up going months or even years before tackling an important project, waiting for that perfect and inspired frame of mind, when if I had just simply started, wherever I was at, I would be long done and enjoying the fruits of my efforts.
There are also all those tasks that I simply do not want to do. Those tasks may be quite important, but I procrastinate because they are difficult, time-consuming, and not at all enjoyable. A prime example of this is my annual report that is due in two weeks. I am trying to resist the urge to consider this to mean I have 13 more days to procrastinate. As dull and tedious as annual reports can be, the reality is they are among the most important things we do. We have to communicate our accomplishments effectively to the powers that be, or else we lose the support necessary to be able to continue pursuing great accomplishments.
Whether it is procrastination or the always domineering urgent, when we do not attend to the important but non-urgent, we suffer in the long run. We miss important opportunities because we are mired in things that do not really matter. As we are still on the heals of the holiday season, I am reminded of one of my favorite stories, the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. This year I realized that, as often as I have watched one of the many movies (I am partial to the one with George C. Scott), I never read the actual book. Fortunately, my wife gave me said book for Christmas so that I could address that omission. Something that struck me that was in the book but not captured the same way in the movies is when Marley departs, and Scrooge looks out to see many other phantoms in misery who had neglected the important things in life. Dickens writes, “The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.”
As natural resource Extension professionals, interfering for good is what we do. We improve people’s lives with knowledge, resulting in significant contributions to an improved natural environment, which in turn improves more lives. We empower and inspire people. We do good work. If we are slaves to the urgent or perennial procrastinators and perfectionists, though, we may let good work go undone and eventually lose that opportunity to interfere.
As we embark into the new year with our goals, we have the daily opportunity to attend to the important but non-urgent things on our lists. We can be deliberate about carving out time in our schedules to pursue these things. We can be deliberate about declining more of the unimportant things that compete for our attention. We can let go of procrastination and perfectionism. We have the opportunity to interfere and do more good work. As comedian Mel Brooks said, “Immortality is a by-product of good work.” Our work lives on. That is our impact and the legacy we leave.
