Important - or just urgent?

Lynne Patrick

 

A long time ago someone introduced me to the Pending Tray Theory. It goes like this:

 

Every project and task that lands on your desk goes straight into the pending tray. The ones that really matter float to the top; people hassle you for them, a deadline approaches (or passes), or somehow they demand attention and you deal with them. Everything else sinks to the bottom, and either wasn’t that important in the first place or isn’t missed if it doesn’t get done.

 

Well, it’s a point of view. I suspect it’s the way a lot of people work. If I’m honest, I do a lot of it myself.

 

The flaw in the system, two flaws in fact, is that urgent stuff gets priority, and everything is urgent when it first comes up; and urgent isn’t always the same as important.

 

So sometimes you need something to focus on, to translate important  into urgent.

 

One thing people learn about me very quickly is that I have no patience with business meetings: the kind of occasion at which various people from various bits of an organisation gather in a room and throw ideas around for a couple of hours. I’ve done it often enough to know that the useful decisions mostly get made elsewhere, and the idea-throwing and associated chatter invariably goes on far longer than the subject matter merits because everyone wants their say.

 

So when I was invited to a sales meeting by our distributors, I wasn’t exactly filled with joy.

 

The meeting was an opportunity to tell their sales reps about Criminal Tendencies, our charity anthology, which doesn’t come out till next April, but hey, I didn’t invent the system…

 

It meant five hours’ travelling for less than an hour for less than an hour with the sales team: effectively a whole day away from base. And it’s a busy time (not that’s there’s really any other kind) and plenty of stuff was demanding attention here in the office.

 

Though since they get a whole lot of information anyway, maybe the point was to get the sales team as fired up about it as I am myself.

 

So how was I going to do that? They spend a couple of days a month listening to publishers getting excited about their new titles; why would mine stand out?

 

They listened politely as I told them about the book, and what I’m planning to do by way of promotion; there were a few comments, a couple of suggestions. No one got excited or fired up. So on the face of it, nothing happened to change my opinion of the value of meetings.

 

But…

 

Going to the meeting at all gave me a focus. It me push some small and apparently urgent jobs to one side (so far no one has given me any flak about them so they can’t have been so very urgent) in order to apply my mind to how we’re going to promote the anthology, so that I could present an organised and reasonably detailed marketing plan to those reps. So it served a useful purpose after all.

 

Since books only sell if they’re visible, and it’s frighteningly easy for us little guys to get buried under a mountain of surefire bestsellers, promotion is arguably the most important job I have to do. But dreaming up innovative and eye-catching ideas doesn’t have a deadline, and no one comes looking for me to ask where they are; so it’s a job that’s rarely at the top of the pending tray.

 

And it’s far too easy to fill the working day with ‘urgent’ jobs.