The problem with Eisenhower's famous important and urgent matrix is the important but not urgent work never seems to get done. Or at best it happens rarely.

If you spend all your time working in "What's the next thing that's going to blow up if I don't deal with it now?"* mode nothing's going to stand a chance of getting your attention unless it needs fixing now.

(*That's a quote from a new client when I asked her how she decided what she worked on next. )

It doesn't matter how important or valuable an idea you have. If this is your default way of working there will always be a myriad of other things demanding that you deal with them now.

Not that how metaphorically loud something is shouting at you is any indication of how important it is but there you go.

Whack-A-Mole. All Day, Every Day.

None of this does anything to quell your frustration that while you're playing another Groundhog Day of Sunday league Whack-A-Mole you know you’re not getting to the stuff that you should be working on.

(Especially if you're fixing a problem that could easily have been avoided in the first place. Or someone else hasn't done what they said they would do when they said they were going to do it and now you're picking up the pieces.)

Whack-A-Mole is such a frustrating, infuriating, draining, and stressful way to spend your working life. Ironically you're so busy and exhausted playing this stupid game that you don't have the time to work out what needs to happen so you can stop playing this stupid game.

Another day spent doing this today means that you're likely to spend tomorrow in the same way. The projects that you need to get done to move things forward and grow your business are precisely the ones standing still gathering dust.

Finding Solid Ground

So how can you begin to find some solid ground in the quicksand?

The first step is acknowledging this is where you are.

I spent years working in a very open office. It didn't matter what I was trying to focus on if someone needed something I'd get interrupted.

People would wander in and start speaking expecting that you'd immediately break off from whatever you were working on to help. The same went for phone calls, unscheduled visitors, deliveries, you name it.

I was interrupted so often that when it came to doing work that I knew I needed uninterrupted time and space to focus on - sales copy, website coding, figuring out the import trade tariffs for South America, weekly review, anything creative, intricate or detailed - I was reluctant to even start.

The interruption virus was rife.

That's not a good place to be.

One solution is to wait until you know you won't get interrupted. But the problem with waiting until everyone else has finished for the day is by that time you've had enough too.

It's hard to produce quality work when your brain is toast and the warning light on your internal fuel tank has been flashing red for the last hour.

The longer you put this work off the more it builds up and the more frustration, guilt and angst it creates. Another week and another month go by and you still haven't got your act together to get this thing done.

What started as a project you were looking forward to doing is now a giant ball and chain that you're dragging around with you. That is until the stress of not getting it done is so acute that you lock yourself away and don't resurface until you've finished.

But you're going to be doing this solely to get it off your plate and that's unlikely to result in something meaningful that you're happy with. It's definitely not going to be an enjoyable time.

You could decide to drop the thing altogether. Wait until it becomes urgent enough and whack it with your mallet like everything else. With a bit of luck you'll whack it so hard you'll shunt it far enough into the distance that you won't have to think about it again for a month or two.

I'll be the first to admit that none of these ideas are very attractive. Or effective.

Go into Hermit Mode

A good long-term solution would be to block out some space when you have time and energy to get stuck into some of these bigger projects. Where you have the energy to tackle them and you can guarantee that you won't get interrupted.

If you're fortunate enough to be in a position to do that for your business don't wait. Going into hermit mode by making yourself unavailable, sending all of your calls to voicemail and quitting all of your messaging apps is a great way to get these projects completed and shipped.

But if setting up "no-interruption Wednesday morning" so you can disconnect from the grid is out of your control where do you go from here?

Something Small, Every Day

People often ask me, “How do you find the time for the work?” And I answer, “I look for it.”

Austin Kleon - Something Small, Every Day

Find five minutes. Start with five minutes every day. Block it off in your diary if you need to, but start with a small chunk of time.

Take the most valuable project you've got, the one you're still enthused about, the one that you're dying to get stuck into. The one that's going to be enjoyable to work on and enjoyable to finish because you know how much of a positive impact it's going to have.

In the five minute space that you have chisel off a small chip of that project.

I know that you're not going to be able to do much in five minutes. But five minutes can turn into ten or more on a good day. If you can get five or ten minutes every day you can make some noticeable progress in a week or two.

Working this way builds momentum. Momentum makes it much easier to put a project down and pick it up again. If you leave a project on the shelf for a couple of weeks it goes stale. The way that you think about it does too.

"Each time we avoid the task it becomes seemingly more monumental."

Peter Shepherd - Momentum is underrated not an accident

But by far the biggest benefit you get when you do this is that no matter how off-script or out-of-control your day gets, when you get to the end you know you've still done at least one small proactive thing that you'd planned to do.

You've moved the needle, even if it's only a tiny bit.

You know that slowly but surely you're getting there. The mountain that you had to climb isn't quite so monumental as it looked a few days ago.

And for five minutes every day you can leave the moles alone.

P.S. There are another couple of factors at play here.

1. You can create a lot of time and space by automating, delegating, and simply deleting a lot of what's on your plate. But setting up all of that takes time and space that you don't have if you're dealing with a daily tidal wave of new stuff, distractions, interruptions, and diversions.

   Getting into Hermit Mode when you can and taking small, positive steps every day will at least buy you some time to make some changes.

   The alternative is to bite the bullet, put everything on hold for a day and make some overnight "I'm not doing this any more" changes.

2. No matter how much you automate, delegate, and delete there will always be important and urgent stuff come up that you have to deal with right here, right now. And there will always more important, high-value projects to do than you can possibly do.

If your job title should read "Lead Whack-A-Mole Expert" rather than "Managing Director" and you'd like to play a different game but don't know where to start, I can help.

Book a Productivity Coffee with me and we'll map out a solution so you can retire your mallet.