Say no to urgent things
The obvious choices in our lives are easy: Something urgent and important must be handled right now. Something that is not urgent or important doesn't need to be dealt with right now (or at all). But our lives will be defined by whether we spent our time responding to petty demands or we had the discipline to say no to the urgent to take care of the important ones.
That means the only way to do the important things in life is to learn to say no to urgent things. It's impossible to make more time. You can only choose how to spend the limited amount you are given. If you want to do important things, you have to reject the tyranny of the urgent.
So, here are three things I've done to make it easier for me to say no to unimportant, urgent demands:
1: Establish defensive walls to keep urgent demands from reaching me. I have turned off notifications for almost every app on my computer and phone. I have turned on my phone's "silence unknown callers" feature. Even the apps that send notifications don't get to make a noise and interrupt me, they just put a little red number passively in the background. I don't give urgent demands permission to bother me.
2: Define clear criteria for what is important enough for a "yes." Everything else is automatically "no." If I wait to see how it feels in the moment, then I'm in trouble. At the beginning of each week, I write down the important things in my life, and if it's not clearly one of those issues (or an actual crisis), then the answer is already no. I don't get to consider it. Urgent issues always feel more significant than they are, so I remove the need to decide under the pressure of the moment.
3: Enlist others to help me hold the line. I have people I trust deeply in my company and my family who, in addition to doing their own work, remind me of what matters and challenge me when I say yes to an urgent/non-important issue. Even better, they don't complain when I don't do critical issues quickly. I also have a personal executive coach (yes, even though I am a coach, I have a coach) who spends a big chunk of time helping me evaluate the choices I made and clarifying what real importance is in my life. Don't do this alone. It's too hard.
Stop trying to squeeze more important stuff into your life. Say no to urgent things, and you will find more time to do what you care about most.