The dangerous emotional rewards of being busy

You probably know the Important vs Urgent matrix. In fact, you may be so familiar that you could draw it from memory. If you don’t know what it is, let me say that the name kind of gives it away, and a quick web search will reveal hundreds of examples. Here’s mine:

What isn’t much discussed about this matrix is the emotions it encodes. Specifically there are two big emotional things going on here:

• Urgent things usually do have an emotional charge, and

• Important things often don’t have an emotional charge.

That makes it very tempting to spend time on the bottom left - where we are constantly busy, which feels very rewarding - and never spend time top right, which give us less of a good feeling but ultimately is key to long-term success.

We all know the way that urgent things can exert a grip on us. At its strongest, the grip seems almost literal. When I get really caught up in a task it can feel like a hand is reaching in and grabbing me behind the solar plexus.

The way out of this dilemma is to catch the process of stimulus and response in the act, so we can find the gap between the sensations and our reactions to them. When we notice the feeling for what it is (a feeling), then we have a chance to pause and gently redirect ourselves to a different course of action. This can be an uncomfortable process. We don’t have control of our feelings and the “iron grip” of urgency may hang around longer than we’d like it to, even when we’ve seen that it’s “just a feeling” and have broken our habitual response pattern. Building our capacity for this kind of discomfort is an important step towards achieving our goals — in the same way that building our capacity for muscular discomfort is an important part of improving our physical fitness.

This is not an easy practice (I speak as someone who regularly fails at it), but it does work, and it does get more manageable the more you do it.