Final summary
The key message in this book:
Too often, we focus on the wrong things in life, which results in stress and disharmony. To increase your quality of life, you need to identify your priorities, replace urgency with importance and create balance between all your tasks. You can do this by having a future-oriented vision, which will help you set effective goals. When you put your “first things” first, instead of putting the urgent or smaller things first, you’ll achieve happiness and inner peace.
Instead of focusing on what's urgent, focus on what's important.
Most people arrange their daily schedules by doing things they think are urgent and important, such as going to work or visiting family.
The problem is that often the “urgent” and “important” things in our lives aren't the same. When we have to choose between doing tasks that are urgent, and tasks that are important, most people choose the urgent ones.
There are a few reasons for this. For one, urgency is a status symbol in Western societies: if a person is stressed from having too much work, we assume they must be important. If a person isn’t stressed out, they often want to defend themselves, so they don’t seem insignificant.
Another reason is biological: taking care of urgent responsibilities can give you an adrenaline rush, which makes you feel energized and alive.
Unfortunately, when we focus on urgency, we have less time for what's really important. For example, imagine you haven't had much time with your family lately, so you plan a family evening, only to have your boss ask you to join a business dinner that same day. What would you do? Most people would choose the business dinner and postpone the family evening for later. Though you can postpone the family evening, decisions like that can cause distrust and disappointment in your family in the long-run. That mistrust is much harder to fix than to prevent.
Important things like spending time with family are what bring us long-lasting happiness, but these things are rarely urgent, so they can be easy to neglect. But in the end, it’s possible you’d be happier not attending the meeting. Surely, you can’t choose your family in every case, but you also shouldn’t always let urgent things get in the way of what's truly important.