Day 114: Important & Urgent

I’ve been getting a lot more emails and inbound messages lately due to having a lot more Intention users. Normally, I’m used to opening my email inbox, processing the messages, and then going back to work. But now my inbox promises an endless amount of things to process: I open my inbox, see that there’s a bunch of new Intention feedback, and then spend all my time simply reacting to all the things that have come in. At the end of the day, I realize that I haven’t had any chance to tackle any of the important things I wanted to work on.

One tool for evaluating my situation is through the Urgent-Important Matrix, where you divide your work along two dimensions:

Important: How significant is this for achieving my goal?
Urgent: Does this require immediate attention?

The idea is that once you’ve sorted your tasks in this way, you can prioritize your work and employ different strategies for working through them:

[https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE\_91.htm](https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_91.htm)

[https://goalmuse.com/life-planning/starter-life-planning/the-action-plan/the-urgent-important-matrix/](https://goalmuse.com/life-planning/starter-life-planning/the-action-plan/the-urgent-important-matrix/)

The problem with my strategy so far has been to treat incoming feedback as Important & Urgent. I thought that in order to treat my users well, I should be very responsive and check feedback regularly. I’m quickly learning that this is a faulty assumption. By filling up my time and energy with responding to people, I’m not giving myself the space to deeply think about the product and improve it in ways that would benefit them.

Processing feedback is important because it helps me understand what people want and helps me catch bugs, but is it truly urgent? With the exception of learning about critical bugs through the feedback form (which hasn’t happened yet, thankfully), none of the feedback I receive requires my immediate attention. So going through feedback would actually fall under Important & Not Urgent.

My plan going forward is to delay looking at incoming feedback until later on in the day, when I’ve had the chance to spend a big chunk of my day actually working on the product. In the long run, it might make sense to check feedback less frequently (going from every day to once every few days or even once a week) and setting up a dedicated day/time period to process it all so that I’m not in a shallow, reactive state so often.