Every time you put effort and energy into an task, ask yourself: ‘What will this accomplish?’

It doesn’t make much difference whether your endeavor was useful, financially rewarding or simply meant to entertain: whenever you engage in an activity that requires work, there should be an expectation of results.

People who are familiar with sorting their tasks by importance and urgency know that activities that are neither important nor urgent should be ignored (which they never are), but the next two quadrants are the ones where lives are truly wasted: the urgent activities.

Many of them are reviled by companies, which have black listed them as productivity killers. The list is too long to mention, from last minute developing extra project options just in case, to the ad hoc meetings demanding progress reports to see where the project stands, to the worst offenders, paperwork simply meant to make one look busy.

Nothing is ever that simple, because there is often a reward associated with these alleged time wasters: people feel that acting busy makes them look more valuable.

Offering last-minute options might be a person’s way of agreeing to whatever a client wants to make them happy.

That progress report nobody asked for may be someone’s attempt to increase one’s visibility in a group.

There is no way of knowing whether something was worth doing other than obtaining the desired result.

If you did, your effort was well spent. If you didn’t, your preparation, planning and regularly updated progress charts were a waste of time.

Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable.

Stop doing things because you have the skills and stop working really hard on things nobody wants. Stop trying to shoehorn uncertain futures into rigid schedules that are unfit to contain them.

The method, the structure, the organizational chart, the five-year plan are completely pointless time wasters when things turn on a dime and the factors influencing a project are unexpected, contradictory, yet to be determined or dependent on circumstances out of your control.

How to know if what you are doing matters, then?

1. Is the result even possible? Or are you trying to please an authority figure, while being fully aware the expected outcome won’t happen.

2. Is the effort allocated to the endeavor proportionate to the reward? Or are you digging through bare rock to plant your garden?

3. Are you building your sandcastle in a tide zone?

4. Do you really care about what you are trying to accomplish? I know this is an obvious question. You’d be surprised how many times the answer is no.

5. Will the outcome fit into the larger plan of your life? And if not, is it worth the sacrifices necessary to accommodate it?

6. Will the result matter in a month, a year, a decade? Not to oversimplify this, but

Any project requiring effort whose shelf life is shorter than six months should be scrapped right off the bat.

Life throws curve balls all the time: the detailed plans we make for your future are easily undone by technological challenges, acts of God, personal crises, and sudden shifts in priorities, but people rarely regret doing the things that matter to them, even when those things fail or earn them public disapproval.

Society has created algorithms for every task it is able to anticipate. There are tried-and-true ways to do just about anything you can think of. Find those algorithms first, and if they work, use them. They will be strongly recommended to you by default and you may second guess yourself when you feel they’re not a good fit for you; trying them anyway, against your better judgment, is the perfect example of an activity guaranteed to waste your effort and yield no benefit.

Last, the important and urgent category is a unicorn. Unless the End Times are imminent, nothing truly important is urgent.

Truly important things, the things that matter, need time to build their ecosystems, connect to other things that matter, sink below your reasoning threshold to become a part of who you are. Their progress is incremental; they grow in layers; they take wrong turns all the time and need to correct. They run into luck, or unexpected blocks, and you should expect both. They don’t live and die on a deadline.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* Unimportant tasks are time wasters whether or not they are urgent.

* Society has created tried-and-true ways to do just about anything. Try those ways first, if you feel they might be a good fit. Don’t second-guess yourself if you believe they don’t apply to your situation.

* Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable. Stop doing what you’re good at if nobody wants it. Stop working really hard on projects that are dead on arrival.

* Stop trying to shoehorn vague futures into rigid schedules that are completely unfit to contain them.

* Do you really want the result, and is it worth the effort and sacrifice?

* Is what you’re trying to accomplish possible, and will it survive its infancy?

* Any project whose result has a shelf life shorter than six months is a waste of your resources.

* Things that fit into the important and urgent category are exceedingly rare. Important things, the things that matter, need time to develop and don’t live and die on a deadline.

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