The Manager's Handbook

9Make Your Day to Make Your Month

What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

John Serino and I together ran a retail chain with more than 115 locations across five states. John was fond of telling his team, “Make your day to make your week. Make your week to make your month.” He understood that success comes from stacking together hundreds of well‐executed days.

But since time is not a renewable resource, doing so requires planning out each day. Not just when you feel out of control, but all of the days, without exception. The consequence of not doing so leaves you squandering vast portions of your time doing things that don't matter. Absent a plan, instead of completing the work that adds value to your organization, you'll blow time on the “shiny objects” and “dumpster fires” that draw us like a moth to the flame—which is not where you want to go if you're the moth.

There's a reason for this: it's how we're programmed, and this is the first step to changing our behavior. As humans we evolved to respond to urgent stimulus, whether it's a charging saber‐tooth tiger or a foraging gazelle. The amygdala is a part of the brain that controls emotion, and for centuries, it developed to over‐index on immediate events because that is what kept us alive and fed. Activities that benefit from longer term thinking, like farming or operating a business, are relatively new to the human consciousness. Dr. Neil Lewis and Dr. Daphna Oyserman ...