29. Creating Urgency Without Rush

If Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is, And That’s A Good Thing

I hate being in a rush. Just this morning I forced myself into rushing out the door to get to my first appointment on time. By on time, I mean early, and we’ve talked about that before, but the feeling of being rushed is one that I absolutely despise. This being the case, I’m going to change my morning routine starting tomorrow. It’s too tight, so I’ve got to adjust.

What I’m going to do is be better prepared tonight so that tomorrow morning is easier. I’m also going to reprioritize what I do as soon as I wake up. I’ll spare you the boring details, but tomorrow I plan on having a leisurely walk out to the car rather than a rushed one and I don’t plan on setting the alarm any earlier.

This is about creating urgency for how I want my days to look.

Here’s the first definition of urgency when I asked Google for one:

A state or situation requiring immediate action or attention.

Here’s where people go wrong. They’ll try to act with urgency to get out the door on time by rushing around and moving faster. They’ll try to get up earlier, and they’ll inevitably end up in a rush again because it sucks to try to just push yourself to do something differently without assurance that anything will be different. See “Coffee With Cody” issue #19 for a detailed discussion on why you can’t just push yourself to sustainably do something.

It needs to be by design. That definition of urgency says that there’s something that needs immediate action or attention, but it doesn’t say the action or attention needs to be a literal immediate physical change.

Here’s what urgency means to me.

Immediate attention means creating a new plan today that can be implemented tomorrow. Action means prioritizing your day right now so that all your business gets taken care of later. To me, it’s urgent that I don’t feel rushed in the morning, so I’m going to address it before it’s morning again.

What I see happening to people are short bursts of urgency being thrust upon them due to lack of prior urgent behaviours. As a result, the immediate action that ensues is hasty and thoughtless, mostly because it hasn’t been thought of. When you allow life to just happen to you, you’ll end up in a rush all the time. If you don’t think about what’s to come, a) what comes will be random and b) you’ll always be in reaction mode, unable to look around and pick which way you go next. Over time, life will seem harder than it is.

Making urgency the norm is a great way to make life just a bit easier, but don’t take my word for it. If there’s an actionable item I want you to leave with after reading this, it’s listening to this podcast episode from the Tim Ferris show with Derek Sivers.

Derek Sivers used to do this bike ride near the Santa Monica beach when he lived in LA. He enjoyed biking, but it was for fitness, so he pushed himself to the limit and always seemed to clock his time at 43 minutes on the dot. He’d crush it every time, huffing and puffing, working on his fitness, but eventually he became a bit less psyched to go on these bike rides. It began to feel like work. One day, he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. He could do the ride, but he wasn’t going to push it. He didn’t have the mental energy to go after it, but he figured he’d still do the ride and just try to enjoy the scenery without worrying about his time. At the conclusion of this first leisure ride, he glanced down at his watch to see what his time was. To his astonishment, he clocked in at 45 minutes, just 2 minutes longer than the rides that nearly made him quit biking.

On the leisure ride, he quite enjoyed himself. He noticed things on the path he’d never noticed before, and was in quite a good mood at the conclusion of the ride, rather than gasping for air and wanting nothing but to get off the bike. An inconsistent short burst of urgent effort almost ended a wonderful, healthy hobby. All for 2 extra minutes. The difference between rushing and taking your time can be so subtle, but you can’t take your time unless you intentionally enable yourself to do so.

Derek Sivers is an incredibly high performer in many areas, so he wasn’t satisfied with continuing this routine of pushing to the brink of failure. Lifestyle design was urgent for him, which allowed him to come to the realization that if he just slowed down a bit, he can still get the benefit without the same sacrifice.

If you make urgency a personality trait rather than a short term necessary effort, you’ll notice that your output greatly increases per unit of input. The return on where you put your efforts will skyrocket. It doesn’t have to be so hard to make improvements in your life.

Being a gym owner and personal trainer, I workout a lot, but if you saw me in the gym during my workouts, you might not think I work that hard. To be clear, I do, but it’s very well designed. I’m not interested in finishing my workout feeling like I have nothing left to give, nor do I like it when my workouts prevent me from having enough time to take care of business throughout the day. This being the case, I take longer breaks, do fewer exercises and put intense focus on the exercises that I choose. It’s quite common for someone to do somewhere around 10 exercises for 3 sets, but I’ll routinely do around 3 exercises for 10 sets.

Now before you go about trying this for yourself, I want to make clear that this is not my fitness advice for you. If you ever find yourself at Warehouse Gym Co. Ltd. , you’ll quickly see that fitness is not one size fits all. The specific tactics vary based on who you are, your history, your goals and intentions. The point is that it must be by design to compliment the life you want to live.

Don’t just show up to the gym with 45 minutes to spare and see what happens. Don’t just set your alarm and hope you walk out the door on time. What we do is too important to leave it to chance, and short bursts of necessary urgency do us no favours. Make designing your life urgent so that your morning routine, your driving habits, your workouts, and business decisions don’t have to be.

If everything is urgent, nothing will be. If you hit every red light on the way to your appointment, it shouldn’t matter. It should be urgent that you are where you need to be when you need to be there, therefore it should be urgent that you give yourself extra time. Your urgency on/off switch will get worn out if you only use it when you’re forced to.

There’s a lot of stuff for us to do. There’s always going to be something to take care of, so we’ve got to be ready and prepared. Reacting to all the inevitable curve balls one at a time is a sure way to strike out. Spend the time in the batting cage and practice knocking it out of the park for when it matters. That time is coming.

- Cody