How often have we been told to avoid the “tyranny of the urgent”, that we need to focus on the most important work first, not the most urgent.  But the problem is this assumes that all the fires in our life are not as important as longer-term priorities. But deep down we know this simply isn’t true.  When our house is on fire there’s nothing more important than putting the fire out.

The reality is that tackling the most urgent issue facing us is very often the highest value activity we can do to have a productive and successful day. Urgent problems grab us, hold onto us, and demand our undivided attention. That’s  why the urgent rules us like a tyrant. When a loved one is in crisis that’s both urgent and absolutely important.  When a key employee announces he or she is considering leaving your team, we must drop what we’re doing to step into the situation. Because if we don’t submit to these tyrants, the long-term, important things, like our loved ones health or our team’s performance, may be in jeopardy.

So the first approach to dealing with these little tyrants is to try to avoid them ever popping up their ugly heads.  We must heed the advice of management and life guru’s – be proactive.  Just as we can avoid some of the cavities in our teeth with a little daily flossing, we can avoid some of the tyrants that invade our lives if we’re a bit more preventative and proactive.

But the truth is, we live in a fallen, broken and bent world where we can never be proactive enough to completely  keep away all the ugly little tyrants . They will inevitably show up in our lives.  There’s just no way around this hard truth on this side of eternity.  We can proactively floss them down to a smaller number, but we can’t change our genetics or the bad water.

So what can we do?  There’s two simple steps we must take to prepare ourselves for the inevitable tyrants trying to take over.

• First, face reality and expect them to come. It’s the nature of the world we live in.
• Second, create margin in our lives so we can effectively deal with the tyrants when they come our way.  Just like having an emergency bank account, we need an emergency time, energy and focus account. We need margin in our life. This is easy to say, hard to do, but its the only way we can deal with these little tyrants before they rule us.

Take these two steps and we move to the place where the urgent is no longer a tyrant but an opportunity to do important and often lasting work.