How do you know if you are living life in urgent mode? Stephen Covey has some good questions that are helpful for us: "Are there things you’d like to do that you can’t do because you feel tired or out of shape? Are you in debt, working-long hours, and barely scraping by? Do you feel alienated and alone; unable to spend quality time with the people you love? Do you feel stagnant? Are you being held back in career advancement because you lack the education? Do you feel vague about what’s important and unclear about what you want to do with your life?" Any of the questions that you answered “yes” to means that you are probably living in urgent mode in any of those circumstances. Do you feel that your life is being lived for you? If so, then urgency is the dominant factor in your life.
Some things demand our attention. Urgency is a part of life. A car needs repairing, an illness occurs, a teacher walks in class and says, “We are having a pop quiz,” death comes to every family, someone losses a job, a friend needs a place to stay; a family member needs to borrow some money. Urgency shows up in every life. It is a fact of life. The problem is when urgency becomes the dominant force in our life.
Urgent things will always fight for the attention of your schedule. Important things will stand by and wait for you to make them important. Never let important things wait until you get the urgent out of the way. There will always be something pressing for your time. We cannot manage time. We will always have twenty-four hours to work with. What we can manage is the choices we make in regards to how we use our time.
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