You Need to Consider to Whom Something Is Important

Discerning whether something is important can be tricky.¹ You can start with 3 questions:

How much does something matter?
For how long does something matter?
In what context does something matter?

In addition to these questions, you also need to ask “For whom does something matter?”² This question of for whom something matters contains two distinct senses.

Interest

The first is interest and highlights who benefits from whatever activity you’re considering.

It can be an odd thought to consider, but not everyone has the same level of claim on your involvement. The command to love your neighbor excludes no one. So, as a good (next door) neighbor, you might watch out for your neighbor’s children when you see them playing too close to a busy street. But you won’t invest in them in the same ways and to the same degree as you do your own children. (And your neighbor would have good grounds to find you a bit creepy if you tried.)

As Paul says, “Let us do good to all, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith.”³ The doing of good especially to one class of people doesn’t by any means imply that others are excluded. But it does direct specific attention to the priority of the claims that certain others have on benefitting from your doing good.

Paul considers this principle particularly as it applies in the Christian community. But it helpfully extends elsewhere too. You wouldn’t want to do good to a casual acquaintance in a way that means you’ll fail to do good to those who are closest to you.

So, the closer to the center someone is in your “circle of concern,” the more important an activity associated with that person will be.⁴

Agency

The second sense of the question “For whom does something matter?” has to do with agency. In this sense, the question highlights who performs the activity you’re considering.

In some cases, an activity might matter, so it’s important and needs to be addressed. But it might not matter that you’re the one who does it.

There might be an equally good outcome if the activity is addressed without your involvement. That might happen by someone else doing it (delegation) or by creating a system so that no one has to do it (automation).

In some cases, the outcome might even be better if you’re not involved because you’re not the best person to produce that outcome. Someone else might have more expertise, speed, bandwidth, or any number of other resources that will allow them to produce a better outcome than you could.

Or setting up a system that runs without input from anyone could do the same. Automated systems are excellent for ensuring consistency, since they circumvent human error. And they keep work from trading hands. It just moves off everyone’s plate altogether.

Consequently, the more something can be handled automatically or the more someone else is better able to handle it, the less important it is for you to be the one to do it.

Life’s too short for you to spend it on what’s not important for you to be doing. And discerning that isn’t about selfishness. It’s about personal responsibility and self-discipline.

It’s about intentionally devoting yourself to what you honestly believe is best because, in the end, the person you’ll have to give an account for is you.

Conclusion

It can feel a bit odd to reckon squarely with a difference in levels of different people’s claims on you or need for your involvement.

As Greg McKeown summarizes,

When we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional strategy. When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people … will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.⁵

By all means, yes, you should extend to others the kindness of being of service to them. But both kindness and self-discipline are fruits of the same Spirit (cf. Gal 5:22–23).

And it’s sometimes necessary to exercise the discipline of incurring unpopularity with some in order to prioritize what matters to others as fully as they deserve.

Header image provided by Jimmy Dean. ↩
Particularly helpful in assembling this list have been David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2003); Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019); and Rory Vaden, Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time (New York: Perigee, 2015). ↩
Gal 6:10; my translation. ↩
For helpful discussion of the relationships between a “circle of concern” and a “circle of influence,” see Covey, Habits, 88–100. ↩
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 16. ↩

3 Questions to Help You Know Whether Something Is Important

Deciding what gets priority can prove challenging.¹

The Eisenhower Matrix is an incredibly useful tool to clarify your activities and basic responses to them.²

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant 1 Characteristics: Urgent, Important Response: Abbreviate	Quadrant 2 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important Response: Concentrate
Not Important	Quadrant 3 Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important Response: Separate	Quadrant 4 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important Response: Eliminate

Even so, urgent activities can easily squeeze out those that are important. That danger is particularly acute because importance can be more difficult to ascertain than urgency.

So, the two can easily be confused by a kind of mental substitution. When asking the harder question “What’s most important?” it’s tempting to substitute the easier question “What’s pressing on me the most?”³

But pressure is more a signal of urgency than importance. Thus, the question of criteria becomes particularly acute when considering whether an activity is important and, if so, to what degree.

Criteria for Importance

Although there’s no mathematical formula for determining importance, you can ask four questions to help clarify whether something fits the bill.⁴

I’ll discuss the first three below. The fourth requires more comment, so I’ll address that one separately.

How Much Does Something Matter?

This question correlates with importance probably most directly and clearly. So, it’s probably also the least helpful (since its most likely to be most synonymous).

But it’s still worth asking explicitly. Sometimes, simply asking the question can start helping you realize that whatever you’re considering actually does (or doesn’t) matter all that much. You can then rate its importance accordingly.

For How Long Does Something Matter?

When considering urgency, you’re interested in when something matters, specifically how soon it matters. Importance is also concerned with time, but things that are important often matter for longer.

For instance, you might feel that it matters to be current with the news. But if you are current, you’ll have to get current again tomorrow.

By contrast, when you invest your time in durable relationships or projects, those can matter for a great deal longer than nearer-term aims. So, you should tend to weigh those things that matter for longer as more important and vice versa.

In What Context Does Something Matter?

Not infrequently, a given activity might appear to matter a great deal in one context. But if you reframe the context—especially by taking a bigger-picture perspective—you might find that it matters less or not at all.

For instance, if you’re invited to a meeting, you might earn a kind of good will by going, even if you have nothing particular to contribute. But if you’re in the meeting, you won’t be working on a research project that will have a much longer-term significance.

So, that wider perspective would lead you to weight working on your research as more important than warming a chair in a conference room.

Conclusion

Ultimately, importance is weightier than urgency. But amid the loud clamor and heavy pressure from the urgent, it can be hard to tell what’s actually important.

To start discerning, ask how much, for how long, and in what context something matters. You’ll still have to integrate and evaluate the answers. But you’ll have ready at hand some of the key building blocks for determining whether something is important and, if so, to what degree.

Header image provided by Oliver Roos. ↩
On this matrix, see especially Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 159–64. ↩
This kind of substitution is copiously documented in Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). ↩
Cf. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2003), 48. In deriving the questions I discuss below, I’ve particularly benefitted from Allen, Things; Covey, Habits; Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019); and Rory Vaden, Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time (New York: Perigee, 2015). ↩

How Do You Know When Something Is Urgent?

Deciding what gets priority can be tricky.¹ But the Eisenhower Matrix is an incredibly useful tool to clarify your activities and basic responses to them.²

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant 1 Characteristics: Urgent, Important Response: Abbreviate	Quadrant 2 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important Response: Concentrate
Not Important	Quadrant 3 Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important Response: Separate	Quadrant 4 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important Response: Eliminate

Without clarity about what makes something urgent or important, urgency can readily masquerade as importance. When it does so, Quadrants 1 and 3 can easily drown out Quadrant 2.

Clearly, any criteria for identifying the urgency or importance of your commitments can’t yield consistent results mechanically and automatically.³

But they can make the process less ambiguous. In doing so, they can help free you from the “tyranny of the urgent” that subordinates all questions of importance under itself.⁴

Criteria for Urgency

Between the urgency and importance, it’s much easier to identify urgency. Urgency focuses on the question: When does something matter?

The sooner something matters, the greater its urgency. The greater the urgency, the more whatever situation will press upon you socially, emotionally, cognitively, or otherwise.

That pressure occurs on a sliding scale. That pressure might rise to a level where you notice it making you disconcerted. If so, the cause of that pressure has moved from “not urgent” to “urgent.”

The reverse is also true. You might have a commitment you do need to complete. But that commitment might slides down the pressure scale to a point where you’re comfortable with it. In that case, it’s moved from “urgent” to “not urgent.”

Of course, there are degrees of urgency, just as there are of importance. For example, a heart attack has greater urgency (and importance) than a cavity. But the basic transition from “not urgent” to “urgent” comes when something starts demanding your attention, however softly or loudly.

Conclusion

At this stage, it can be helpful to probe whether the urgency dissipates if you reframe an activity.

Perhaps there’s an emotional or social push to complete something as soon as possible. But you might recognize that there won’t be any discernable negative consequences until much later.

If the urgency remains for whatever reason, you’ll have a Quadrant 1 or 3 activity. But if it dissipates, then you have a Quadrant 2 or 4 activity.

If the urgency dissipates and doesn’t leave importance behind (Quadrant 4), you can simply eliminate the activity.

Or if the urgency dissipates but importance remains (Quadrant 2), you can concentrate on that commitment at the appropriate time(s). And you can avoid being harried over how quickly you’ll complete it.

Header image provided by Oliver Roos. ↩
On this matrix, see especially Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 159–64. ↩
Cf. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2003), 48. ↩
Particularly helpful in assembling this list have been Allen, Things; Covey, Habits; Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019); and Rory Vaden, Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time (New York: Perigee, 2015). ↩

You Need to Decide What Gets Priority, but How?

Identifying when you’ll do your research begins with identifying when you won’t.¹

The time you set aside for other life priorities—e.g., your family, your job, your church—then provides a frame for the time you can structure to make progress on your research.

But all of this begs the question of how you decide what gets priority in the first place.

The Eisenhower Matrix

A common way of explaining how you should decide what gets priority is by citing a decision rubric attributed to Dwight Eisenhower. Portrayed as a two-by-two grid, the “Eisenhower Matrix” groups activities on continuums of urgency and importance.²

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant 1 Characteristics: Urgent, Important	Quadrant 2 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important
Not Important	Quadrant 3 Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important	Quadrant 4 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important

On this scheme, it becomes clear that you want to spend as much time as possible as possible higher up the grid and farther to the right (i.e., Quadrant 2).³

No one likes to be perpetually investing in things that fall into either “not important” category (Quadrants 3–4). But Quadrant 1 (both urgent and important) also tends to be a less than ideal place to work.

It’s not always the case, but many urgent things could have been handled in ways that would have prevented them from becoming urgent in the first place.

You need to address Quadrant 1 items. But Quadrant 1 often involves crisis management and “putting out fires.” So, the more you work in Quadrant 1, the more likely you’ll be to experience stress and burnout.

Over time, you should be able to move what might be Quadrant 1 items into Quadrant 2 because of how you get out ahead of the urgency that characterizes Quadrant 1.

A Response for Each Quadrant

With these principles in mind, it’s possible to identify a characteristic response to activities that fall in each quadrant.⁴

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant 1 Characteristics: Urgent, Important Response: Abbreviate	Quadrant 2 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important Response: Concentrate
Not Important	Quadrant 3 Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important Response: Separate	Quadrant 4 Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important Response: Eliminate

For Quadrant

Work over time to abbreviate how many activities fall into this category.
Concentrate your attention on the activities that fall into this category.
Separate yourself from activities in this category, whether by automating them or—if it’s an option—delegating them.
Eliminate from your life as much as possible activities that fall into this category.

Conclusion

All of this is very well and good, but if the discussion stops there, a key element is missing. That is, simply saying that you should minimize Quadrants 3 and 4 and focus on moving Quadrant 1 into Quadrant 2 doesn’t immediately provide any help with deciding what falls in each quadrant to begin with.

What makes something urgent or not urgent? What makes it important or not important?

In short, helpful as the Eisenhower Matrix is, discussions of it often leave the criteria for deciding what creates urgency or importance mostly implicit. But with some careful thought about those criteria, it becomes much easier to decide what falls where.

Header image provided by Oliver Roos. ↩
See especially Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). ↩
On this point, see Covey, Habits, 159–64. ↩
Also helpful but with somewhat less nuance than I’ve tried to create below is the discussion by Taylor Pipes, “Work Effectively with the Eisenhower Matrix,” Evernote Blog, 2 May 2017. ↩

Your Research Is Important, but It’s Not All-Important

You might have a great idea for your next research project.¹ That idea might be based on a question that’s clearly compelling to your audience—or one that you’re willing to make compelling.

But if you never make time for your research, your idea will go nowhere and help no one. The question is: When can you work on it? As Stephen Covey observes,

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.²

And the process of scheduling your research priorities starts with planning when not to work on your project.

When Not to Do Your Research

It might be counter-intuitive to start assessing when you can do your research by considering when you won’t.

But as important as your research is, it’s easy to forget that other things are more important. So, when you’re “schedul[ing] your priorities,” some things take precedence.

To take a personal example, while I was writing my dissertation, there were a lot of long days between that project and the jobs I had at the time. During that time, we also had our first child.

Between work and school, there wasn’t a lot of “family time.” But, largely to my wife’s credit, we made it a priority for me to at least be the one to put our daughter down to bed.

In a way, it would have been very easy to invest that time in the dissertation or other work. But I’m so grateful we didn’t let that happen. Instead, we set a firm boundary that school and work demands weren’t allowed to cross.

That’s just a small example. And arguably, it would have done me even more good to have even stronger boundaries around other times wasn’t allowed to happen.

The Value of Boundaries

As Cal Newport calls it, “fixed-schedule productivity” improves your productivity when you are working on a project because it commits you to clear boundaries for when that work can happen.³

The project’s deadline is coming. If you’re going to get it done on time, you don’t have infinite sway before the deadline to push everything else in life to the side. So, you had better make the most of the time you have to work on it.

The point is that you’re a whole person. And as a whole person, some things are more important than your research. Both you and those closest to you should expect that to be the case.

Very often, the things that are more important aren’t the one’s that are most urgent at the time. They’re not the meetings, requests, emails, and deadlines that so easily fill the day. But they’re the things that, at the end, you’ll want to be sure you’ve deeply invested yourself in.

A Cautionary Tale

A powerful negative example is George Ladd, as recounted by John D’Elia.⁴ As much good as Ladd’s scholarship did, he didn’t contextualize that scholarship in the frame of other things in life that should have taken priority over it—not least, his family.

Not only didn’t he keep his research in perspective, according to D’Elia’s picture, Ladd seems to have actively prioritized his research over things that, in principle, ought to have been more important.

Ladd might not have intended that to be the case, but that’s the problem. According to the “commonplace” cited by Northcote Parkinson, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”⁵ So, when there aren’t clear boundaries around work, it tends to expand until that’s all there’s time for.

Conclusion

So, yes, it’s important to identify clearly when you’ll do your research. But that process has to begin with deciding what’s more important than your research.

Doing so will fix the boundaries within which you can then get creative about how you structure your work—without reversing priorities and sacrificing to your research something that should take priority over it.

Header image provided by STIL. ↩
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 170. ↩
Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central, 2016). ↩
John A. D’Elia, A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ↩
“Parkinson’s Law,” Economist, 19 November 1955. This principle is sometimes called “Parkinson’s Law.” But Parkinson’s Law, as Parkinson explains it, is not so much about the expansion of work to fill the time available for it as it is about the multiplication of administrative officials within a system. ↩

A Conversation about Essentials

Some time ago, Michele Cushatt, Michael Hyatt, and Greg McKeown sat down to discuss “essentialism,” or “the disciplined pursuit of less but better.”

Unfortunately, the discussion recording has now been taken down.

More thoughts from Greg along these lines are available in his book Essentialism. But there were two points in particular that stood out to me from the discussion that aren’t brought out as clearly in the book.

1. The End Game Isn’t Saying “No”

Undertaking a “disciplined pursuit of less but better” requires saying “no” to certain things, sometimes things that are quite good in themselves. The point of doing so, however, isn’t saying “no.” The point isn’t withdrawal, isolation, or a reticence to be helpful.

Rather, it’s a matter of reckoning with the very real fact that the nature of human existence requires tradeoffs. The reality is that we can’t do everything. Whenever we say yes to something, we automatically say no to something else.

We are going to end up saying “no” to things personally, professionally, or both. The question is, “Have we made the space to reflect and ensure we’re saying yes to the right things, the most important things?”

If not, we’re in greater danger of failing to be present for others as well as we might otherwise do, whether that’s in a community organization, at a church, or in a family. We’re in greater danger of failing to contribute to the other people in our lives in the best way we can. We’re in danger of not saying “yes” to the most important things because we’ve allowed “yes” to be said for us in relation to any number of other less important things.

2. Try Having a Quarterly Review

Very practically, it’s good to schedule time once per quarter to think carefully about how we’re doing with the things in life that matter most.

Exactly what this “scheduled time” should entail will be different with different folks in different contexts. Think about what will help you best reflect on what has happened in the past quarter and assess that quarter against what is truly important. Then, you can strategize for the upcoming quarter depending on what went well or what didn’t.

If you haven’t had a quarterly review cycle yet and would like some tracks to run on, you can see Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever for his advice (pp. 219–22). You can then go from there in sorting out a quarterly review routine that works for you.

Of course, there’s nothing sacrosanct about a quarterly cycle. But, you probably want something long enough to take in multiple months and short enough to give you a place to pause and reorient when needed. If your life is already structured around a traditional three-semester academic calendar (fall, spring, summer), you might try scheduling a review for yourself at the transition points between each of those blocks.

Conclusion

Some things in life are much more important than others. But, the important things aren’t always the ones that bang on the door and demand the attention they should receive, as non-essentials often do. In such an environment, it’s up to us to ensure we prioritize what’s truly essential, rather than leaving that to the mercy of circumstances to conspire together or choose well for us.

What stands out to you in this conversation? What ideas does this video spark to help you ensure you attend to the essentials as you do life in biblical studies?