Too often we slavishly allow our lives to be led by the urgent and end up having no time to do the important. On autopilot, we've little chance of being able to know the difference between urgent and important. Today, make sure that you do something that is important to you and your loved ones - something that's important to how you want to lead your life. And, as often happens, some of what seemed urgent will simply go away.

It's a constant theme that comes up when I work with leadership teams - we don't have enough time to do the important things and we constantly seem to be battling the urgent. Some call it firefighting but, truth is, we're comfortable doing meaningless habitual things - they make us feel that we're important and busy and, most importantly, they keep us, ever so nicely, within our comfort zone.

I've used words like meaningless and habitual: reading every email (even the ones that were CC'd to you to cover the sender's backside) is meaningless. Doing things because "we've always done it" is meaningless. An example: a client decided that he would stop sending a weekly report to Head Office and see how long it took them to ask for it. He kept preparing it, so that it would be ready when they asked - but they still haven't... three years later. I've loads of similar examples.

Going to meetings, just because you've been invited, is another source of potentially meaningless activity. As is sitting through a meeting for an hour - becuase the conference room was booked for an hour! - when your business is done after forty minutes is a further waste of precious time... and you'll never get that time back.

And we complain about work/life balance - that our kids have grown up in the twinkling of an eye and we feel we've missed it. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we were reading CC'd emails when we should have been at our children's Sports Day... but, hey, it made us feel important.

There's a difference between feeling important and doing what is really and truly important - but you need to be in charge of your own state of mind to know the difference.