It’s Tuesday 5 pm and you are getting ready to wrap-up your work for the day.  An email comes in from your manager which states a presentation is needed on the project you have been working on for the last 6 months, to share at the upcoming Annual discussion meeting with the Board members.  The presentation is due on the coming Monday morning.  Since you have been the project lead, you know every detail on this project so you say to yourself “Sure thing!  I can put this presentation together in less than 30 minutes”.  You shut down for the day and move on to your personal life! 

Fast forward to Sunday night – you have had 6 cups of coffee and trying your best to put this presentation together.  There is a critical piece of information you need and are unable to locate it.  Unable to remember whether it was ever created by you or your team, frustrated, you proceed to re-create a new version so you can include in the presentation.  You have to put so much time in creating this piece, you almost have to pull an all-nighter and by the time it is dawn, you are exhausted and need to finish up so you end up pulling things from here and there and finish it.  Since you need to get some sleep in, you hit send and go rest a bit. 

That Monday morning, your manager requests a meeting with you first thing to clarify some questions they have and as you are going through it, you realize, you provided a sub-par, low quality presentation for such an important meeting!  All because, you were not proactive! 

So, what exactly does “Being Proactive” mean?  Let me explain:

Being proactive means “being aware of the ask and planning ahead of time”.  It requires a lot of effort to really start being proactive and once you get going, holding yourself steady on that path throughout your life. 

As you read through the above narrative and have been able to relate to it in some way, you know how it feels to be in that position.  You feel complete lack of control over what is happening to you as you are unable to go back and change things to make the outcome better.  Only if you had planned on Tuesday evening or Tuesday night on how you can accomplish what you are being asked of by pulling in the right resources in the right time, the outcome would have been completely different.  You did not think through how your activities over the next couple days may hinder your ability to pull this presentation together, which you thought would take “less than 30 minutes”.  You did not anticipate what the next days would bring so you could allocate a specific time to get your work done on the presentation. 

Being proactive requires you think long-term.  To plan ahead of time, you need to know what is already at play in the upcoming hours, days and weeks and anticipate what might potentially come down the pike so you can successfully navigate through any distractions and prioritize things in your life.

I often try and impart this knowledge on to my 12-year-old, who also provided me inspiration to write this blog post.  It is easier relating this to her school work where she thinks she has plenty of time to prepare for her exams, when in reality, time flows like running water.    

Stephen Covey, an American educator, in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”, referred to the “Eisenhower Decision Matrix”, that talks about how one can prioritize the daily tasks or activities that they come across using the 4 quadrant approach as follows:

As Eisenhower often quoted:  What is important is seldom urgent, what is urgent is seldom important. 

Urgent tasks are those that require our immediate action.  Important tasks are those that impact us in the long run.  Very few tasks are both urgent and important, but most life changing activities are important but not always urgent and hence tend to always get side-lined as we try and get through our daily lives. 

If we all were to follow this matrix and go through the exercise of mapping our daily tasks or activities to these 4 quadrants, we will immediately realize we spend so much time on things that are not necessarily important that we hardly can give time to the real important things that drive our long-term mission, vision and goals. 

The most important lesson that we have been taught by our beloved Prophet SAW is that always think long-term.  This life is short so always keep in mind your ultimate goal of where you will be after you have passed through this life.  That is your “most important” task.  However, as we all know, we hardly give it as much importance as it deserves to get, and as such we barely give it any priority or time.  The 5 pillars of Islam have been put in place taking into account everything that is “urgent and important”.  We should be Thankful to our Creator for that!

I will end this by quoting 2 of Stephen Covey’s famous quotes:

The Key is not to prioritize your schedule, but to SCHEDULE YOUR PRIORITIES!  

The main thing is to KEEP THE MAIN THING, THE MAIN THING!