Doing the important but not urgent things

For almost any white collar worker, there are many things to do that can be considered important, but not urgent. Many things that seem time-sensititve may not be as important as things that are vital for the long-term of the business. It’s more than likely that many of those items should be delayed, until they’re really to the top of the queue.

Something that I consider important, but will never rise up to the level of urgent, is blogging. Blogging is important to me because it helps me crystallize my thoughts on a topic, remember how I felt about something at a given point in time, and possibly get feedback from others on the Net. There’s also the pleasant side effect that the more you write, the better your writing gets! It never hurts to improve one’s writing skill. In fact, the latest SD Magazine suggests that this is one step you can take to keep yourself from losting your job! All of those advantages are certainly worth at least a little time, right?

Collecting links of things that I find interesting is something I do regularly anyway. It’s very easy to click the “Post” button in my browser to create a new entry when I spot something cool. The blogging that I’m talking about making time for is writing more feature articles.

Starting today, I’m going to allocate 15 minutes out of a typical workday to writing articles. I have a backlog of things that I want to write about, so you’ll probably see a few longish articles here over the next few weeks. I’m no Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky, but I think these articles will be interesting for people in the software biz.