How to Decide What to Focus On When Everything Feels Urgent

You separate them by asking a different question. Not “what needs doing soonest,” but “what actually moves my one objective forward” — and then treating everything that fails that test as noise, however loud it’s shouting.

I had to learn this fast. When a stroke cut my working day down to four hours, I couldn’t afford to let anything “feel” urgent without checking first. There wasn’t time to be wrong. Three years on, running Digital Drift and Four Hour Freedom inside that same window, the skill that made it work isn’t time management. It’s a specific filtering step I call Define — the first of what I call the Three Ds (Define, Distil, Do) — and it exists purely to answer the question you’re asking: how do you know what to focus on when everything feels important?

Urgent and important are not the same signal

This mix-up isn’t a personal failing. It’s a documented bias. Researchers Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee ran five experiments and found what they called the “mere urgency effect” — people will reliably choose a task with a lower payoff over a task with a clearly higher payoff, purely because the lower-value task appears to be expiring sooner. Urgency has its own pull, completely separate from whether the task is actually worth doing. That’s not a discipline problem you can fix by trying harder. It’s a bias baked into how attention works, and it means your gut feel about what’s “urgent” is not a reliable guide.

Here’s the part that made this real for me: almost none of the urgency in a typical day is about your own goals. It’s an email that wants a same-day reply, a client message with an implied deadline, a notification demanding a decision right now. Other people’s timelines get to set your sense of urgency by default, unless you’ve already decided what actually matters to you. Without that reference point, everything with a deadline attached looks equally important — because you have nothing to compare it against.

Define: the filter that gives you a reference point

This is why Define comes first in the Three Ds, before any prioritising happens. You can’t sort what’s actually important from what merely feels urgent until you’ve named the one thing you’re actually trying to move forward.

A Define session is a quarterly reset, not a daily habit, and it’s deliberately narrow. You review the last quarter honestly — what actually happened, not what you meant to happen. Then you set a single quarterly objective. Not a list. One thing. It has to be something you’ve decided matters, tied to your own definition of “enough,” rather than a target borrowed from someone else’s idea of what a solopreneur should be chasing.

The “one objective” part isn’t a stylistic preference — the evidence backs it. A survey of 1,800 global executives found that as a leadership team’s priority list grows, revenue growth relative to peers actually declines, and organisations that stuck to a maximum of three priorities were the most likely to outperform (Columbia Business School covers the research here). More priorities doesn’t mean more gets done. It means everything gets diluted, including the things that actually mattered. One objective isn’t a compromise. It’s the version that actually works.

What Define actually looks like in practice

Concretely, a Define session covers three things. First, an honest review: what did last quarter actually produce, and where did the hours really go? Second, a look across the whole of your life, not just the business — I use nine life roles, because “Entrepreneur” is one part of a life, not the whole of it, and a quarterly objective that ignores the other eight tends to get quietly sabotaged by them. Third, the objective itself: one sentence, specific enough that you could tell, at the end of the quarter, whether you hit it or not.

Once that objective exists, you finally have something to hold every “urgent” request up against. Not “is this due soon” but “does this move me toward the one thing I decided this quarter is for.” Most urgent-feeling tasks fail that test immediately, which is uncomfortable the first few times and gets easier with repetition.

A test you can run this week

Take everything currently fighting for your attention — the inbox, the messages, the half-finished tasks — and sort each one into just two piles: things that are urgent to someone else’s timeline, and things that are important to an objective you’ve actually chosen. Most people find the “someone else’s timeline” pile is much bigger than the “my actual objective” pile. That gap is the whole problem, and it’s exactly what Define is built to close.

If you haven’t set a quarterly objective yet, you don’t have a real answer to “urgent to whom, important for what” — which is why everything still feels equally loud. Set the one objective first. The filtering gets dramatically easier once there’s something to filter against.

So: how do you know what to focus on when everything feels important? You stop asking what’s loudest and start asking what moves your one defined objective forward. That’s the entire function of Define, and it’s the step that makes the rest of the Three Ds — Distil and Do — actually work. If you want to see how I run a real Define session, one quarter at a time, that’s what I write about in the Four Hour Freedom newsletter.