Steven Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

We all like to be overachievers. Someone says, achieve, and we jump right to it. We even achieve

multiple things at once. I'll bet you're listening to this while driving or working out.

Am I awesomely psychic, or what?

We make lists of projects that we have to do, and then each project becomes a collection of

to-do items.

We add those onto our to-do list, and pretty soon, we have more to-do items than Imelda

Marcos has shoes, and Amelda has a lot of shoes.

It's not easy being Amelda.

Imagine being invited to a function.

She has a choice of 3,487 pairs of shoes she might wear. How does she decide? Does she organize by color? By how much of the toe is visible? By the number of sequence? My pal Bernice

would approve. Or maybe by topological shape? Bernice's boyfriend Melvin would love that,

or how about how many countries Imelda has visited in a given pair? Jet-setting Europa would go wild.

It's too hard a problem. Some theoretical mathematicians speculate it will take longer than the

lifetime of the universe. Just ask math dude. Fortunately, your to-do list is a lot more manageable than a Meldes

closet. Today's episode is a tribute to the late Stephen Covey. He was the author of seven

habits of highly effective people, and he recently passed away at an age of much older than me.

I don't know if he invented it, but he's certainly popularized one way to think about choosing

tasks to do. And here are some tips based on his wisdom.

Urgency and importance are different.

Stephen Covey noticed that we decide a to-do item as high priority in two very different ways.

The first is urgency.

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