I’ve been thinking a lot about the wrestling that goes on between “in” and “on”, or as I have sometimes described it, your job vs the business.Another way of distinguishing these is between BAU (Business - or Busyness - as Usual) on the one hand and special effort on the other. Busyness As Usual gives us the expected results for the usual input and activity. It’s all the stuff that gets generated by being in business – interactions with clients, prospects, staff, suppliers, systems etc. It comes at us at least as fast (and often faster) than our ability to process and despatch it. A lot of it appears to be urgent, because someone else’s ability to remain in busy-ness depends on your response. Much of our Busyness As Usual is self-perpetuating.And it’s not as if the line between the important and the rest is clear and unambiguous. We’re big fans of having just 3 MIGs (Most Important Goals). We’ve found in our own business that tightly focusing on our MIGs has enabled us to make that important/unimportant call more quickly and confidently. But even then, we have RIGs and QIGs (Relatively Important Goals and Quite Important Goals – we don’t do Pretty Important Goals). We have to make the commitment to focus on the MIGs ahead of the RIGs and QIGs, because if we don’t favour the MIGs, they won’t happen as quickly or as completely as they should.This is where the rubber really hits the road: we don’t tend to waste a lot of time. We spend our time and effort on things that matter. The hard part is that we have to deliberately choose some things that matter more than other things, even though that choice has costs, especially in the short term.The short term pain, the reason we get swayed by RIGs, QIGs and NIGALs (Not Important Goals At All), occurs in our brain. Neuroscience is used to explain a lot these days, and many neurophysicians would tell you that it a lot of it is neurobollocks, but this much is true: our brains consume about 70% of our energy. It’s a complex wee beastie and it takes a lot to run it. And one of the tasks it finds hardest is prioritising. When you prioritise between two or more things (let’s take two to keep it easy for the wee beastie), you have to imagine a future with this thing in it along with how much effort went into it along the way; then you have to do the same calculation with the other thing. Then you have to compare the two. Effectively you are making an assessment of the relative value and effort involved in two imagined futures.Your brain will always default to the path of least resistance. If one of the options involves less work or is easier to picture, your brain will opt for that. And by the way, that calculation happens faster and less visibly than any computer can achieve (yet).So there is real effort involved in derailing that train of thought, and deliberately selecting the MIG over the RIG. And effort for the brain is a pain. But here’s the thing: the long term pain of doing less important stuff ahead of the Most Important Goals is much higher.Pain now or pain later.