You’re probably familiar with the decision-making matrix from Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’:
Davidjcmorris, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The problem is that this diagram doesn’t tell you what to do when everything is urgent, which is how things tend to be by the time we humans get round to dealing with them.
The answer is I think, to start dealing with all of them, focusing first on the things that will either have most impact, or will enable you to still be around to deal wth the other urgent things.
A story in today’s Science X Newsletter illustrates this perfectly.
Methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but only hangs around in the atmosphere for about 10 years. So by reducing our methane emissions quickly (especially if we use captured methane to replace new fossil fuels along the way), we can have a big and rapid impact on global warming, while our strategies for dealing with CO2 are taking longer to have an effect.
Like so much else with the climate crisis, we already have solutions to hand, we just need to pick them up and use them.
What do you do when everything is urgent?
Take a deep breath.
Remind yourself that it’s not too late.
Then get started.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
