Career planning is important because nobody plans to have a career crisis on a Tuesday.
However, that’s exactly when it tends to happen.
A restructure is announced in the Monday all-hands meeting, and by Tuesday you’re staring at an email about your role being “under review”. Or that your role will be made redundant as of this week.
Or perhaps it’s more subtle than that. A moment in a meeting when you make a suggestion, watch it float past unnoticed, and realise that somewhere along the way, you became invisible in your own workplace.
I’ve supported professionals through hundreds of these Tuesdays over more than twenty years as a career coach. And I’ve noticed something that separates the people who navigate them with confidence from the people who feel completely blindsided.
It has nothing to do with talent, seniority, or luck.
It comes down to when they started paying attention to their career.
What is the Urgent/Important Matrix?
Stephen Covey made this framework famous in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, though he credited the idea to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reportedly observed that what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.
The matrix is beautifully simple.
Draw a cross on a piece of paper so you have four boxes. One axis measures urgency, the other measures importance.
Every task in your life lands in one of the four quadrants:
Urgent and important:
The crises and deadlines that demand attention right now
Important but not urgent:
The meaningful work that builds your future
Urgent but not important:
Other people’s priorities dressed up as emergencie
Neither urgent nor important:
The scrolling, the busywork, the time confetti
Covey’s great insight was that effective people spend most of their time in the second quadrant, the important but not urgent one. It’s where health, relationships, learning, and long-term plans all live.
And it’s exactly where your career, and career planning, or job search branding belongs.
Why your career never feels urgent (until it suddenly is)
Here’s happens in that second quadrant: nothing in it ever shouts for your attention.
Your career doesn’t send calendar reminders. It doesn’t escalate itself to your inbox with a red flag. It sits there patiently, year after year, whispering things like “you really should update your resume” and “it might be worth having a coffee with that old colleague.”
However, the urgent quadrants bellow about deadlines, meetings, and everyone else’s emergencies! I call it OPP (Other People’s Problems).
So your important resume stays untouched. Your LinkedIn profile still describes the job you had two roles ago.
Your nagging question about whether this career still fits you gets filed under “I’ll think about it after this busy period ends”.
And as we all know, the busy period never ends. It simply hands the baton to the next one.
Then one Tuesday, without asking your permission, your career suddenly jumps quadrants.
The redundancy conversation. The restructure. The new manager who changes everything.
And now the most important area of your working life is also the most urgent, and you’re making decisions that will shape the next decade under the worst possible conditions: pressure, shock, and a bruised sense of your own worth.
What does “important but not urgent” career work actually look like?
This is the question I wish my new clients would have asked themselves before THEIR Tuesday arrived. The good news is that the work is neither mysterious nor overwhelming.
It looks like this:
Knowing your value
Can you articulate, clearly and confidently, what you bring to an organisation? Not your job title, but the problems you solve and the results you deliver. Most professionals I meet can do this for everyone on their team except themselves.
Gaining career clarity
Do you know what you actually want from the next chapter of your working life? Clarity is the foundation of every confident career decision, and confidence doesn’t suddenly happen. It grows with structured reflection, honest conversations, and having a skilled guide, in your corner, asking the questions you’ve been avoiding.
Keeping your career assets current
Your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and your professional story should always be no more than a light polish away from being ready when needed. Not because you’re planning to leave, but because opportunity and disruption share the same habit: arriving unannounced.
Nurturing your network before you need it
Networking when you urgently need a job feels like asking to borrow money. Networking when you don’t need to makes it feels like developing a friendship. The relationships you tend in the calm quadrant are the ones that open doors during the urgent one.
The professionals who thrive did their career work early
When I think of my clients who moved through redundancy or career change with the most confidence, they shared one quality. They were not starting from zero on their worst day.
They knew their worth, so a restructure didn’t feel like a verdict on their value. They had clarity about their direction, so they could assess opportunities instead of grabbing the first lifeboat.
Their professional story was ready to tell, so they spent their energy on possibilities rather than panicking and paperwork.
That is what Quadrant Two career work buys you. Not immunity from the Tuesday, because none of us gets that. What it buys you is the ability to meet it more confidently because you will be prepared.
Where are you at in your career right now?
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know the answer. Your career has been sitting in the important but not urgent quadrant, waiting politely for its turn.
Consider this my invitation to you to give it that turn before circumstances do it for you.
I’ve recently recorded a new welcome video on my home page that explains exactly how I support mid-career professionals to gain the clarity and confidence to take control of their careers, whether things feel calm right now or that urgent nasty Tuesday has already arrived.
Watch the video, take my career success quiz to discover where you stand, and if you’re ready for a conversation, book an exploratory chat with me.
The important work is always easier with support, and it’s never too early to begin. I’m here to support you.
>> Book an exploratory chat and let’s discuss your career today.