You have to embrace and fully

[prisilabr03]

Steven Covery talks about “urgent” vs “important” tasks. We see those all the time in business. Urgent tasks, like raising money, often get done at the expense of important tasks, like meeting with customers. On the tech side, we spend time getting new machines configured in the data center or setting up a mail server, rather than adding new features to the product. Over time, some companies are getting the important things done and others aren’t. Guess who succeeds.

The problem is that you can’t simple say “I’ll ignore the urgent tasks.” They’re urgent, after all. You won’t survive if you ignore urgent tasks, but you’ll never thrive until to get past them and move onto important tasks.

Getting past the urgent tasks means dispatching them as quickly and efficiently dataset as possible. In other words, attend to urgent tasks in order to keep them from eating you up. That’s contrarian, but it’s true. Much of this series has been focused on exactly those kinds of issues. Here are a few things we’ve learned:

Automate everything you can. This is one important task that you can do that will help slay the merely urgent ones. There’s never been a greater set of tools for automating the mundane tasks of administering high-tech products. Kynetx went two years without a fulltime sysadmin and we spent only a few hours per week making all the IT work. An additional benefit of automation is that tasks not only get done, but they get done consistently, improving uptime and reliability. That’s a huge win.