Linear thinking

Day by day you can see examples of linear thinking. We mix up urgent with important, managers neglect long term projects at start but hurry on to do something when it's already late (often putting extra burden on people who work hard to finish it), and many of us are inclined to think that more is more. But the truth is different, urgent is not always important, at the beginning of the project there is thousand times more chance to influence its success than at the end, and doing more is often wasting time on less important things. It seems that it's in our nature;  maybe for millions of year our ancestors were fully occupied with surviving the very day and to collect more from anything we fancied was supporting survival. Even today people who don't care about the tomorrow are often happier, at least until the reality hits in. 

I suggest to use structural thinking which - in my interpretation - means analyzing issues, problems, opportunities at hand, see the connections and finding the key ones. Than put all effort on solving i.e. exploiting these. So instead of quantity and urgency go for quality and importance. Time remains an important factor (it's better having 1000 bucks today than 5000 in twenty years) not at least because our time is always limited but it's only a factor among many.

Not surprisingly organizations usually give more credits of those who are quick of solving problems which shouldn't be arise at all. That's reality too, so you have to take this into consideration (fulfilling your bosses stupid and urgent request is probably better for your carrier than refusing it for the sake of some nice piece of work) but make some time for important things as well. If your a high rank manager you may face the same issue, the problem is cultural and changing culture is a hard task; focus on opportunities which are aligned with the culture but go in the right direction.