By Aaron McLeish · 8 min read
A plumber I know works Monday to Friday, plus most Saturdays. Emergency calls interrupt his evenings. His van is always the first place he goes in the morning. His phone is always in his pocket. He’s been this way for eight years.
I asked him last month if the business was making good money.
He laughed. “Making money? I’m making enough to keep going. I work sixty hours a week and I’m still not paying myself properly.”
Here’s what he told me next: “I feel like I’m doing urgent things all day and never getting to the things that actually matter.”
That sentence is the whole problem. Not the hours. Not the customers. Not the industry. The problem is he has never sorted his tasks into two piles. One pile is urgent. One pile is important. And they are not the same thing.
Let me explain what I mean.
What’s the Difference Between Urgent and Important Tasks?
Urgent tasks demand your attention right now. They have deadlines today or tomorrow. They feel pressing. A customer’s boiler has stopped working in winter. An invoice needs paying by close of business. Your van is broken down on a job.
Important tasks matter for where you want to go. They are not on fire right now, but if you ignore them, they will become the fires later. Planning your pricing structure. Training a team member properly. Reviewing your profit and loss numbers. Building a system so you are not the only person who can quote jobs.
Here is the bit that changes everything: most trades owners spend their entire week doing urgent things and almost zero time on important things.
Then they wonder why they are exhausted, the business is not growing, and nobody else in the team can do anything without asking first.
Why Do Urgent vs Important Tasks Get Mixed Up So Easily?
Urgent tasks feel like they matter because they are happening right now. Your phone rings. You answer. Your brain gets a hit of adrenaline. You solved something. You have done something.
Important tasks do not give you that hit. You can ignore them for a day, a week, a month, and nothing explodes.
But they are building the thing that kills you quietly. Every week you do not spend time on a system for quoting means you are still quoting jobs yourself. Every month you skip looking at your numbers is another month you do not know if you are actually profitable. Every time you pick up the phone to check on a job your team is handling, you are saying, “I do not trust you to do this,” and your team is hearing exactly that.
Consider this. A heating engineer came to me three years ago. He had two engineers working for him. He was still doing every quote, every customer call, every invoice. He was in the van as often as they were.
He told me: “I would love to spend time on the business itself, but there is too much coming through the door.”
That sounded like a win on the surface. Busy equals good, right?
Wrong. Busy and broke is a real disease in the trades.
We used a simple tool to change how he thought about his time. It is called the Eisenhower Matrix. It sounds like jargon, but it is just a grid with four boxes.
The Four Boxes That Change Everything
The matrix splits all your tasks into four corners based on two simple questions. Is it urgent? Is it important?
Quadrant one: urgent and important. These are the crises. The boiler that has failed mid-winter. The customer complaint that has come in. The emergency repair. The tax deadline. These things you do immediately. No choice. Drop everything.
Quadrant two: not urgent, but important. This is where the magic lives. This is planning. Strategy. Building systems. Training. Reviewing numbers. These things do not have a deadline screaming at you, but if you actually do them, they stop quadrant one from taking over your entire life.
Quadrant three: urgent, but not important. This is the trap. These are things that feel like they need doing right now, but they do not actually move your business forward. Answering emails as soon they arrive. Taking a phone call from a salesman. Checking in with a job site when you already trust the team to handle it. These feel productive, but they are just interruptions dressed up as work.
Quadrant four: neither urgent nor important. Delete these. Doom-scrolling. Pointless tasks. Time-wasters. They go.
Here is what I saw when we put that heating engineer’s entire week into this matrix.
He was spending about thirty hours on quadrant one. Fair enough. You have to do the crises.
He was spending about fifteen hours on quadrant three. Checking on his team. Taking calls that could have been emails. Worrying about things that did not need worrying about.
He was spending almost zero hours on quadrant two.
And he wondered why he did not have time to plan.
What Actually Happens When You Start Using Urgent vs Important Tasks as a Filter?
Here is the thing. You cannot magically make quadrant one smaller. Emergencies will still happen. Boilers will still break. Customers will still ring with problems.
But you can move quadrant two up in your calendar.
The heating engineer started by blocking out three hours every Thursday afternoon. Just blocked off. Not flexible. Like a customer appointment, but with himself.
In that three hours he looked at his profit and loss. He planned how to price the next quarter. He built a checklist for one of his team to follow instead of him being asked the same question nine times a week.
Nothing dramatic. Just moving the important things so they were not always losing to the urgent.
By month two, one of his team was doing basic quotes with a template he had built in quadrant two time.
By month four, he was not in the van every single day.
By month six, his profit had gone up while his hours had gone down.
Same business. Same customers. Same market. Different time allocation.
The engineer told me something I have heard dozens of times: “I do not know why nobody told me it was this simple.”
How Should You Sort Your Urgent vs Important Tasks Right Now?
Sit down with a pen and paper or a Google Sheet, if you prefer. Write down every task you do in a typical week.
Then sort each one.
Urgent and important. Do it now.
Not urgent but important. Schedule it. Put it in your calendar as a proper appointment. An hour to look at numbers. Two hours to build a system with a team member. Ninety minutes to review marketing.
Urgent but not important. Can you delegate it? Pass it to a team member. If a team member is not ready yet, that is a quadrant two task. Teaching them to do it. Add that to your calendar.
Not urgent and not important. Cross it off.
The shift from knowing this and doing this takes about a week of discipline. Then it becomes your second nature. Your brain stops fighting against the urgent and learns to say, “Is this quadrant three? Then it can wait. Or someone else can do it.”
Let me explain the deeper reason this works so well in a trades business.
You became a plumber or heating engineer because you are good at the actual work. You like fixing things. You like the customer interaction. You like the satisfaction of getting a boiler running again.
But running a business is different from doing the trade. And no trade owner teaches you that bit.
So you stay in the trade work because it feels like your job. And the business work piles up because it does not feel like your job, even though it is.
Using this matrix is how you give yourself permission to spend time on business and not feel guilty about it.
The Real Outcome
Three years on, that heating engineer is doing one van day a week and spends the rest of the time on his business. His team is bigger. His profit is stronger. He is not exhausted on a Sunday night.
None of that happened because he worked harder.
It happened because he sorted his tasks and stopped treating urgent like it was the only thing that mattered.
Your van, your tools, your skill at fixing things. Those all stay. But if you keep letting urgent tasks run the show, you will never get to the business decisions that actually change your life.
If you want a deeper dive into time management, prioritization, and how to build a business that runs without you in it twenty-four hours a day, this is exactly what “The Systems Handbook” covers. You can grab it on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/45aMvUH. It walks through the real examples and the systems that make this matrix stick for actual plumbers and heating engineers, not just theory.
In the meantime, grab a piece of paper. Write your week. Sort it into four boxes. Then book yourself a quadrant two appointment and stick to it like you would a customer call.
That is the start.
If you want to talk through how this looks in your specific business, email us at info@togetherwecount.co.uk or reach out on LinkedIn at https://linkedin.com/in/aaron-mcleish. Our team helps trades owners get out of the urgent trap and into actual profit.
Aaron McLeish, Managing Director.
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