When I got up this morning I knew that there were plenty of things that needed to be done today. I also had a couple of important things that I wanted to spend some time on. But though they were important, they weren’t actually urgent.

And although I “know” that it’s best to invest my time in the more important tasks, not just the urgent ones, I still got caught up in focusing on all the things vying for my attention. It started with just checking my email, and then trying to quickly knock out one of the tasks I knew I needed to do, but before I knew it, one thing led to another, and soon the day was spent. Sure, I ended up getting a lot of stuff done, but the couple things I wanted to invest some time in got sidelined because they weren’t as urgent as the others.

And so once I again I was reminded of the value of getting the most important things done early on—because once you start doing other things, even checking email, it’s easy to get caught up in whatever comes up, while putting off the things that are actually most important in the long run.