Don’t wait until something becomes urgent to do it. Most of your urgent tasks—the ones that have the menacing power to distract you now—were non-urgent once.
Becoming more alert to time and staying aware of what genuinely deserves your attention at the moment is the key to time-effectiveness.
Idea for Impact: Complete your tasks before they become urgent. You’re thus putting yourself, not the incoming flow of attention demands, in the driving seat.
This discipline of getting things done early won’t help you eliminate real emergencies. Still, on the whole, your self-inflicted crises might drop significantly, and the stress that comes with them. Your efficiency will increase, and so will your predictability and reliability.