Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There is nothing to understand about that point. It's a linguistic distinction which makes no practical difference. It does make a practical difference. Important tasks are higher priority under tighter time constraints and vice versa. I fail to see how this isn't a practical distinction. >If you always lean towards Urgent things, you will neglect the Important. If you always lean towards Important things, you will…
In what universe do you live in that you operate under different time contexts/constraints to the rest of us? The very fact that you are forced to make a choice between Urgent and Important indicates that you ARE time-constrained within your context. If you could do both in parallel it wouldn't be a prioritisation problem. There is only one time context. It's called The Universe. For each worker (human!) Time is a fi…
1) A meeting (Important Urgent) 1 or 2 hours
2) Buy a gift for someone's birthday (Important - can be done any time but must be done) 1 hour
3) Check the marketplace for a limited sale (Urgent - much better if done immediately, but doesn't matter so much if not done) 1 hour
If task 1 takes only one hour, I do 3 then 2. If it takes two hours, I do 2.
There's two contexts above. Obviously as you pointed out, once you actually get to doing a task, there's only one context. But the point is that when adding a task to your to-do list you don't yet necessarily know what that future context will be.
Your choices here are to either make a priority queue for every possible future context (reasonable for this simple case, but doesn't scale to a more complex one), or mark tasks with the relevant information that will let you easily assemble the appropriate priority queue on the fly, once the context becomes clear.