Avoiding the tyranny of the immediate: managing an enterprise requires keeping the focus on "the main thing" and not being distracted by the daily tasks and deadlines that always seem urgent.

• Author: Linden, Russ
• Position: Commentary

Some years ago, I was consulting for a federal government client of about 30,000 employees on an ambitious organizational change effort. The prospects for this effort appeared good. Its external environment was changing quickly, its senior leaders seemed quite committed to the change effort, and most employees thought that change was long overdue, as did many of its key stakeholders and customers.

Yet, after six months and an excellent start, our project slowed down. I asked the people leading various change task forces what was going on, and the most frequent explanation was this: "Oh, that was OBE"--overtaken by events.

I was struck by the demeanor of these people. They were all eager for change, but they talked about the project being OBE in a very matter-of-fact manner, as though they never expected it to succeed. Some had invested hundreds of hours in their project; surely they felt a lot of disappointment. Yet they might as well have been reporting on the weather. Why was that? When I asked one of them (a savvy veteran of the agency), he paused, smiled and said, "Think of it this way. Our deputy director starts the daily senior management team meeting by discussing what he just heard on NPR an hour earlier. So it's no surprise that they get distracted. In this organization, 'short term' means this week; 'long term' means this month."

This organization's leaders, like so many, were victims of what some call "the tyranny of the immediate." What pops up in the e-mail inbox becomes the current priority. Everything seems to be due by close of business today. Work life is a series of urgent (but not necessarily important) tasks and deadlines.

The tyranny of the immediate has many causes. One of them, sadly, is that some people get hooked by the rush to meet endless and urgent deadlines, by feeling constantly in demand and terribly important. But for those of you who aren't impressed by 16-hour workdays and a BlackBerry that never pauses, there are ways to avoid this condition. Here's a starter list:

* Turn off the visual and audio alerts made by incoming e-mails. They only reduce your productivity.

* Consult periodically with a diverse set of important stakeholders and customers. Ask them about their priorities and expectations of your organization. This allows you to be proactive in keeping your finger on the pulse of your immediate environment. If you don't seek out feedback from the groups you're most interested in, you'll continually be...