OPINION - In this fifth instalment of our online business series, Prof Adéle Potgieter unpacks a trap that quietly holds many entrepreneurs back: the constant pull of urgency at the expense of what truly grows a business.
Nadia owns a small travel agency in George.
On the Tuesday I spoke to her, she had arrived at the office at 07:15, handled a client complaint about a cancelled flight, processed four new bookings, responded to 41 WhatsApp messages, attended a supplier call, sorted out a billing dispute, and helped her assistant find a hotel for a client who had missed their connection.
By 16:00, she was exhausted. The proposal she had been meaning to write for two weeks - the one for a corporate travel account that could double her revenue - was still untouched on her desk.
“I just never get to the important stuff,” she said.
She had not yet noticed that the important stuff and the urgent stuff are not the same thing - and that one of them will always crowd out the other - unless you choose.
The trap into which every small business owner falls
Urgency is loud. Importance is quiet. And in a small business, where the owner is simultaneously the manager, frontline service provider, administrator and strategist, urgency wins almost every time.
The cancelled flight is urgent. The 41 WhatsApp messages are urgent. The billing dispute is urgent. The corporate proposal is important - potentially transformative - but it makes no noise. It does not ping, ring or escalate. It just sits there, getting older, while the urgent things queue up for your attention.
The result, for most small business owners, is a business that manages its present extremely well and builds its future almost not at all.
The day is full. The year is rushing by.
A simple way to think about your tasks
Consider every task you face in a week through two questions: Is it urgent? Is it important?
The combination of your answers puts it into one of four categories - and understanding those categories is the beginning of getting your week back.
The tasks that are both urgent and important - a cash flow crisis, a key client complaint, a legal deadline - need your immediate attention. Nobody is arguing with that. The problem is not these tasks. The problem is that most business owners are also spending an enormous amount of time on tasks that are urgent but not important: routine admin, low-stakes messages, and requests that could be handled by someone else or not at all.
Meanwhile, the category that determines whether your business grows or stands still - tasks that are important but not urgent - gets almost no time. Strategy. Staff development. Key relationships. Systems that would save you 10 hours a month. The corporate proposal on Nadia’s desk.
And then there is the fourth category: tasks that are neither urgent nor important. Every business has them. They are the meetings that produce nothing, the reports nobody reads, the habits that made sense three years ago. They deserve exactly one action: stop.
Working on the business vs in it
There is a distinction that every small business owner will recognise the moment they hear it: working in your business versus working on it. Working in it means serving customers, fixing problems and handling the day. Working on it means improving the business, building the future, doing the things that make next year easier than this.
Most owners spend almost all of their time in the business - and wonder, after five or 10 years, why it still needs them there every day to function.
The remedy is not a dramatic restructuring of your life. It is a small, deliberate act of protection: carving out time - genuinely protected time, treated like an appointment with your most important client - for the work that grows your business. One hour a week, to begin with. Then two. Then a morning.
Nadia blocked every Tuesday afternoon from 14:00 to 16:00. She told her assistant she was in a meeting. She was, in a sense, with the future of her business. Within six weeks, she had written the corporate proposal, met with the client, and signed a contract that generated more revenue than her entire August the previous year.
The permission to stop and think
There is one more thing worth saying, because few business culture voices say it clearly enough: thinking is working.
Sitting with a problem, walking around the block with a question in your head, reading something that challenges your assumptions about how your business should be run - this is not procrastination. It is the activity that every other activity depends on. The business owner who never stops to think clearly is like the carpenter who never sharpens the saw. They can be very busy. They are not necessarily making progress.
The three S’s of strategic time
- Stop: Identify the tasks in your week that are neither urgent nor important - and eliminate them. You cannot create time; you can only reclaim it.
- Sort: Separate urgent from important. Both matter, but they require different responses. Urgency demands reaction. Importance demands intention.
Schedule: Protect time for the work that grows your business. Block it, name it, and treat it as non-negotiable. The future of your business depends on the work you have not yet done.
This week’s exercise: The time audit
For three days this week, track how you actually spend your time - not how you plan to, but how you do.
At the end of each day, look at each task and ask: was it urgent? Was it important?
Then answer honestly:
• How much time did you spend on things that were urgent but not important?
• How much time did you spend on things that are important to your business’s future?
• What is the one task you keep postponing that, if you did it, would have the biggest impact?
Block two hours next week specifically for that task. Treat it like your most important appointment.
Next column: We begin our series on brand and digital presence - because a business with solid foundations deserves a great reputation to match.
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