Here’s a system to help set aside time for your most important work. Try blocking your calendar for important non-urgent tasks for yourself and see if it works.
In 2018 researchers documented this effect across five experiments in which they asked participants to make trade-off decisions between tasks that varied in urgency and importance. Urgent tasks expired faster, whereas important tasks paid more. They found that people favored urgent tasks over important ones — even when these tasks paid less. It seems that we pay more attention to time when we feel like we have less of it. So when we feel busy, we are more likely to favor urgent, unimportant tasks.