When adding a task, regardless of its category, we have to consider its impact and urgency.

Impact is the financial impact on your firm, positive or negative. For example, if this task is related to a high-value client that you absolutely must keep happy, it is likely that this would be HIGH impact. On the other hand, perhaps you do not have enough cases coming in, and you badly need to get some marketing going. In that case, even though the task is not client-related, the task would also have a HIGH impact.

Urgency is determined by how quickly this task must be completed. The sooner it must be done, the higher the urgency. By default, if the task is not due today, its urgency is probably not HIGH.

A quick note: just because something feels urgent, does not mean it is urgent. For example, if you get a scathing email from a client that clearly has no intention of paying you, that is not HIGH urgency.

The combination of Impact and Urgency together give the task a ranking between 1 (highest priority) and 9 (lowest priority). When you are deciding what task to do next, you should first clear out all of your tasks that are in the group 1 (high impact, high urgency) before you start on tasks in group 2.

In Outlaw Practice, we make it easy to see the impact and urgency of your tasks in one unified view:

When the time comes to focus on one of the areas of the grid, we click on the focus icon to get to the focus view:

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