How often do we come across things that are extremely urgent and painfully important? Some people more often than others but pretty often I would say. What is the problem? It is difficult to make well reasoned decisions under that kind of duress.

However, that situation is totally artificial. In the “real world” out there, the world outside the purely human territory, the things are never urgent nor important. They are immediate. And immediate is quite different from urgent if you dare to think about it.

So the “urgent” and the “important” are inventions of the purely human world. And being the way they are, artificial constructs, they possess an interesting quality: they are not compatible with each other. That is, things can be either urgent or important but never both at the same time! The combination of the two is an artificial trap to lock your attention and force to make mistakes under duress. In a word, it is a trap.

Next time someone tries to trap you with “urgent and important” – think about it. It is not.