Reasons for a task to become important

Eleventh time

In Russia we have a saying that if you call someone a pig ten times, he will oink on the eleventh. The same holds true for important tasks. We deem some tasks important not because they genuinely are, but because of a perception of importance.

I will offer myself as a prime example of a person who succumbs to this error as readily as anyone else.

My tasks stretch across three distinct domains: some of the things I need to do are deeply scholarly, while others are mundane, yet all are equally important.

Or not …?

42, State school, Family

For those of you who are not yet acquainted with what I do¹, I feel obligated to introduce myself and, while doing so, acquaint you with my work:

I am a 42-year-old teacher with a substantial background in management, who has burned out² while “managing” and has been working in a Moscow state school for the past 8 years. I teach English.

I am a scientist³ in the field of pedagogy, and I undertake a wide array of research projects, some of them alone, while others in collaboration with colleagues.

I am a father of two children: a daughter, now a sophomore at a medical university, and a son, still a schoolboy. I am also a husband to a beautiful wife, a son to my mom and dad, and a brother to my sister.

Among other things, I run the largest PKM community in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet, and I write non-fiction⁴.

That said, I can assure you that the sample list of tasks below is merely a sample — enough to give you a taste and a vivid illustration of how I will choose to tackle them.

• Proofread the book on skill acquisition.
• Craft results section of the article on Jedi psychometrics.
• Assess the answers of my students which I got after experiment.
• Send parents a list of teachers so they can print prom night albums as memorabilia.
• Wire transfer money to my daughter (weekly allowance).
• Change tires on Nina’s car.
• Proofread presentation for Merge-Tatarstan conference.

You have the list; I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Guess in which order I will complete the tasks, which of them will be finished, and which will be left untouched.

While you’re at it, I’ll reveal one paragraph ahead how I approached this issue. But before I disclose the sequence of completed tasks, I wish to emphasize that the majority of important tasks are such only because we perceive them so. So, let’s get into what I did:

The very first thing I completed — I transferred the money to my daughter; while transferring, I changed the tires; then I returned home and proofread the presentation, and afterwards did the same with the book⁵. I hadn’t touched the students’ work or the article⁶.

I suspect you, reader, would have ordered the tasks similarly, yet I never touched what I consider the most important of them: assessing the students’ answers, which I need in order to complete my PhD thesis this month, and drafting the results section of the article, which would likewise advance my pursuit of a PhD degree.

My completion pattern followed not the logic of importance but the logic of urgency⁷ — a genuinely fascinating phenomenon that has been examined at some length by Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher K. Hsee⁸.

In their paper “Mere Urgency Effect”, after conducting five consecutive experiments, they concluded that tasks which are urgent, or merely appear urgent, are perceived as important, which nudges a person toward suboptimal decisions. And amid incessant chats and social-media notifications, everything seems so important that most of us lose sight of what truly deserves our focus.

In the next note I unpack the dichotomy of urgency and importance, but before you read it, please compile a list of your own tasks⁹, and rank them on the importance scale¹⁰:

On a scale of 1 to 5, the completion of this task brings me closer to my Big goal (dream), where 1 means it doesn’t, and 5 means it propels me on rocket fuel.

BIO