Is It Urgent, Important, or Critical? How Healthcare CEOs Can Be More Productive.

The most productive healthcare entrepreneurs aren’t the ones who move the fastest — they’re the ones who decide the clearest. Every day brings urgent emails, important meetings, and a dozen fires waiting to be extinguished. But real productivity doesn’t come from doing more; it comes from knowing what’s vital. The leaders who distinguish between what demands their attention and what deserves it are the ones whose organizations grow sustainably, without the burnout that plagues most.

The Pressure Trap: When Urgency Feels Like Leadership

In healthcare, everything feels urgent. Staffing shortages, regulatory changes, patient satisfaction, referral growth — every issue has real impact. But when everything is treated as a top priority, nothing actually gets prioritized.

This is where the classic Eisenhower Matrix becomes more than a time-management tool — it’s a survival framework. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s logic was simple:

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

Yet in the healthcare world, those categories are often collapsed. Founders/Owner Operators are constantly solving problems, believing that responsiveness equals leadership. It doesn’t. Responsiveness keeps things from breaking down; prioritization builds things that last.

According to a Harvard Business Review study, most executives spend over 60% of their time on low-value, high-urgency tasks — the kind that feel

productive but deliver little strategic progress.

Urgent. Important. Critical.

Let’s redefine the third category — critical. Critical work is what determines whether your organization moves forward or falls behind. It’s where timing and consequence meet.

The Mistake Health Care Leaders Are Making

Critical work demands precision, not panic. It’s not about reacting to chaos — it’s about recognizing what has the power to change your business trajectory. Launching a new service line, stabilizing your leadership structure, or addressing visibility issues that affect patient trust — these are critical because they shape the future, not just the day.

To recognize what’s critical, you must step out of reaction mode long enough to see what’s truly driving — or draining — progress. That clarity doesn’t come from working longer hours. It comes from better frameworks. And that’s where Daniel Priestley’s thinking reframes the entire conversation.

Vital vs. Functional: The Daniel Priestley Filter

In Key Person of Influence, entrepreneur Daniel Priestley distinguishes between functional work and vital work.

Functional keeps the machine running.
Vital ensures the machine is worth running at all.

Functional work is what fills your day: reviewing reports, approving budgets, replying to emails. Vital work is what fuels your growth: defining vision, building culture, strengthening visibility, and shaping the reputation that attracts talent and patients alike.

For healthcare CEOs, vital work is what defines leadership — and functional work is what dilutes it.

Priestley warns that most professionals get stuck in the functional because it feels safe and immediately measurable. But vital work, though slower to show results, builds brand equity, community trust, and organizational resilience — the things that make your health care brand last.

The Cost of Living in the Functional Lane

When leaders stay trapped in functional cycles, they become managers of motion instead of creators of momentum. Their days get filled with activity, but their organizations remain the same.

Healthcare entrepreneurs know this feeling intimately — the late-night email checks, the calendar packed with “status updates,” the creeping sense that you’re busy but not advancing.

A 2024 McKinsey report on executive effectiveness revealed that CEOs who spend at least 40% of their time on strategic visibility and culture-building lead organizations that outperform peers by nearly 30% in revenue growth. Yet most CEOs surveyed spent less than 15% of their time there.

The math is simple: when you lead from the functional, your brand becomes forgettable. When you lead from the vital, your brand becomes visible.

The Productivity Illusion

Modern leadership has glorified activity. We wear “busy” like a badge of honor. "On the grind" might be the poplar phrase you're familiar with. But activity isn’t productivity — and productivity isn’t progress.

For health care-preneurs , this illusion is costly. Every hour spent reacting to an operational detail is an hour not spent shaping perception, defining strategy, or advancing visibility — all of which directly influence how your brand is positioned in a competitive market.

Patients and partners don’t judge your brand by how quickly you reply to an email; they judge it by how consistently your values and expertise show up across digital channels, professional circles, and patient experience.

That’s why productivity must now include brand stewardship as a leadership responsibility — not a marketing afterthought.

Leadership in the Age of AI: Delegating Functional

AI isn’t replacing leadership; it’s redefining it. Tasks once considered “urgent” — information gathering, content summarization, report generation — are now easily handled by intelligent systems.

The most forward-thinking CEOs are using AI to reclaim focus. Instead of spending mornings reviewing dashboards, they’re using AI to interpret insights. Instead of writing repetitive communications, they’re using automation to maintain consistent brand voice.

This shift frees leaders to focus on what’s vital: vision, trust, and growth.

According to a 2025 Deloitte survey, over 70% of high-performing healthcare organizations credit automation and AI with improving executive focus and strategic bandwidth. The ones resisting technology aren’t saving time — they’re losing relevance.

Redefining Productivity: From Output to Impact

In today’s environment, productivity is measured not by how much you do, but by how effectively your work moves the mission forward.

That means evaluating daily actions through three filters:

Urgent: Must this be done now?
Important: Does this align with the organization’s mission or growth goals?
Critical: Does this advance the brand, visibility, or leadership capacity in a way that shapes long-term success?

When all three align, that’s where CEOs must live — the intersection of clarity and consequence.

And when they delegate the functional and automate the repetitive, they create space for high-level insight — the kind that advances the organization’s visibility and resilience.

The Visibility Connection: Productivity and Brand

A leader’s time is an organization’s most valuable asset. But in healthcare, time spent without improving brand visibility is time spent in obscurity.

If your name, your practice, or your network isn’t showing up in the right conversations — whether in Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT — your visibility gap becomes your growth bottleneck.

That’s why brand clarity is now part of executive productivity. Because if your brand isn’t being interpreted correctly by AI or the market, you’re not just missing patients — you’re missing revenue.

Visibility isn’t vanity; it’s validation. And the more clearly your message is communicated across platforms, the more authority your leadership commands.

From Awareness to Action: The CEO’s Next Step

AI can provide basic information about your healthcare brand — it can summarize your site, interpret your tone, even outline your competitive space. But it can’t tell you why your visibility is low or where your authority is breaking down.

That requires human analysis.

The next step for any healthcare CEO seeking clarity — both in focus and brand positioning — is a Brand Awareness Review.

It’s not another marketing report. It’s a diagnostic for your brand’s discoverability, credibility, and engagement health — the same areas that define whether your leadership is being recognized by the algorithms shaping patient choice.

When you understand how your brand is performing in search, AI, and perception, you can stop reacting — and start leading with focus.

To your success,

Darrion Phelps, Sr. MA, MSHCA