Important But Not Urgent

As i was doing some research on Agile development and TOC i saw various references to important but not urgent tasks.
And then i suddenly realized that i had an answer to a problem which i had been grappling in general over the last few years but specifically over the last few weeks.

So here is a problem related to allocations, all the parties agree that it is a serious issue and it should be solved, people have also tried to put in effort to sort out the issue.
So
1) The issue has been there for over four years
2) Everybody is convinced that the issue is serious and needs to be solved
3) The solution is known and pretty straightforward - Most of the issue can get sorted out if teams just updates deallocation information.
However after four years the issue is still there. Nobody wants to update the deallocation.


When i was asked to solve this issue i talked to all the concerned guys. And they all really wanted to solve the issue. But even after a lot of discussion for over three weeks. Nothing happened - no change.
And i spent a long time trying to figure out how come when everything is in place this issue does not get sorted out - everybody agrees, you have a solution , man what else do you need.
And then when i saw the references to 'important but not urgent' i realised that was the problem.

This issue was doomed not to be solved because it was important but not urgent. They had lived with this problem for four years, a week would not make a difference, so while everyone agreed, there was no real push.
There is a fundamental flaw in the rock-pebble-sand parable (http://responsivereaction.blogspot.com/2007/05/rock-pebbles-and-sand-important-things.html )
If you focus only on the rocks, you will never actually ever focus on the pebbles because by the time you finsih with the rocks, there will be more rocks and then more.
That is exactly what happened in this case. New urgent things kept coming up and this issue kept getting postponed. Also as the severity of the issue increased so did the people's resistance to it. So it became more and more difficult to get it in the urgency list

It is like google. Hardly anybody i know ever clicks the next page. If your site does not appear in the first 3 or 4 hits you can rest assured that nobody will ever visit it. Same is with the senior management, if your issue is not in their first three urgent issues you can rest assured the issue will never get solved.

When i look around i see that this simple 'Important but not Urgent' phenomenon also explains a lot of things which have always baffled me

a) I have talked to many people who are unfit and most of them want to get fitter.
They
1) Want to get fitter
2) Feel they will be much better of if they are fitter
3) Have easy access to a gym
4) Have enough money
and yet they are still as unfit as before.
I feel it is because of the same reason. getting fit is important but not urgent. There is always a reason to do it tomorrow and this has gone on for years.
However I have noticed that these same people are able to get super fit when they are looking for a bride. 3 months to their marriage and they are jogging in the morning and taking care of their diet. The moment their is an urgency to getting fit ,most people are upto it.

b) Same is the reason why people who even if they want to are not able to quit smoking. They make a new year resolution and then keep it only for the next three days. Because New Years resolution are important but not urgent. Writing 'Cigarette Smoking is injurious to health' on cigarette cartons makes the whole issue important but not urgent. Showing images of damaged lungs is useless because everybody knows it will not happen tomorrow.
Yet many people have been able to leave smoking when their wives are expecting. Suddenly only nine months creates a sense of urgency which makes leaving smoking at the top of the list

c) This same concept also explains why Parkinson's law is inevitable - Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Tasks which are important but not urgent will suffer one of the two faiths:
1) They will keep getting delayed till the last moment when they become urgent. So while the amount of work is same the calendar days will keep expanding till it is inevitable. This is why most projects get completed only on the last day. All the tasks are important but only become urgent when the deadline is near.
2) People will keep working on the same thing achieving more and more perfection till the deadline approaches and the task becomes urgent. This commonly happens with creative work like graphic. Give a week to a graphic designer and he will create ten copies of a graphic and then choose one. Give him a day and he will make two copies and choose one. (Timeboxing is supposed to solve it http://www.davecheong.com/2006/07/26/time-boxing-is-an-effective-getting-things-done-strategy/ )

So to get back to the allocation problem which I was discussing - I talked to the resource head and he did try to create a sense of urgency by updating team leads that there team was not deallocating resources. However nothing much happened, so he gave up trying. This happens because everybody has a different trigger. What creates urgency for one does not do the same for another. So while escalations do create urgency most of us have got so used to it that they no create a sense of panic in us. For most of us there has to be something more dramatic for us to actually feel the sense of urgency.
So you have to sometimes take dramatic steps like stopping allocation till somebody believes that the issue is urgent and takes action to sort it out.

Even the Extreme Programming- User Story approach sorts out the problem of getting activities done in time by creating a sense of urgency every week on a regular basis. It forces you to consider each task as urgent much before the due date forcing you to deliver on a consistent basis rather than at the end.


So will this article be of any value to anybody - Actually no because like the thought in this article, this article is also doomed to be useless - Because it is 'important but not urgent'