CAT Preparation – Urgent versus Important

Let us take a step outside your CAT Preparation world. In that world, there are things that are urgent. For example, paying a bill if the due date is today. Driving a little faster than usual if you are late for a train or a flight. Meeting a deadline for the submission of an assignment. Or finding a urinal when you really really have to 😛

In such a case, urgent things become important at that point in time. That still does not make them important overall. As in these are unlikely to be anything more than amusing or irrelevant memories just after some time.

Most of our actions (and hence energy) are usually directed towards things that are urgent. Because often we leave things for too late. But how does this impact your CAT preparation?

When urgent becomes important, important gets pushed back

When things become urgent, they become important at that point in time – because you can no longer afford to push them back. And this means that you push the really important, but non-urgent stuff, back. The urgent almost always takes priority over the important in such a scenario.

So for some CAT aspirants, thoughts like how to prepare for CAT most effectively get pushed to the background because they are always struggling to get past what’s urgent. But to make any meaningful progress, you have to look beyond the urgent! You have to focus on what will be important in a year from now, 3 years from now or even a decade from now. Getting into a good MBA college is probably something you would rate as very important, right?

Some Number Crunching

Seen another way, CAT-24 is around 300 days off – give or take a few, depending on when you are reading this. And whether you see this time period as a lot of time or just a little time for your CAT preparation will impact whether you view it as:
a) important
b) urgent
c) important AND urgent
d) neither important nor urgent

Choosing (c) as the correct option would make you a serious CAT aspirant.

In our experience, for most CAT aspirants, a well-planned CAT Prep generally requires around 1000 hours of effort. Of course it is likely to vary depending on what your strengths & weaknesses are and how much work needs to be done on the latter. (That is precisely why identifying your strengths & weaknesses early on and ADAPTING your CAT Coaching efforts around the same lies at the core of the extremely successful ADAPTIVE Prep for CAT at MBAGuru!)

Every hour of effort you put in today basically reduces that 1 hour from the total (say 1000 hours) you need to put in. So, you are working NOW (urgently) continuously on what you consider important in the long term.

If you invest more time now, you would need to put in less time later. You will also keep making steady progress with more time to take into account any unexpected turn of events or requirements.

Conclusion
So,  even if you are debating as to when you should begin your formal CAT coaching, or wondering which is the best CAT coaching for you, or you have joined a coaching but haven’t really got going, it is important that you start that long journey now. Make what is important also urgent enough to invest some time into today.

Start small, that’s okay – but start today! And if you have already started, make today mean something. Invest a little today (very similar to the concept of SIP in equity markets!!)

CAT-24 is important enough to be treated as urgent enough for a few hours of effort TODAY, tomorrow and on most days that follow.

About the author: Deekshant has sleep-walked through several 100 and 99.9 %iles in practically every section of the CAT. That he is a cricket fan and he writes okay is evident from most of his posts. 1000s of our students swear that he can motivate almost anyone to double his/her percentile through very simple yet powerful inputs. And that’s why every MBAGuru student has direct access to him via mail and Telegram. Oddly, he somehow also finds the time to write songs professionally. And yes … almost missed this … he is an alumnus of IIT Delhi & IIM Cal