What's urgent and what's not urgent?

What's urgent and what's not

How much of what you have to do is truly urgent? These days it seems almost everything we have to do is surrounded by a sense of urgency. So what causes this sense? We asked 352 managers in 57 Fortune 500 companies to describe their experience of their work and typical work days. The standout answer by a large margin was "too much to do and not enough time to get it done."

Urgency occurs in our environment by the way we see and react to what's coming at us. If we stop running to catch up for a moment and observe what's happening, we see that we live in a world that appears frantic, haphazard, unsafe, and unpredictable - in other words, urgent.

Minute by minute, we are bombarded by marketing messages, e-mail messages, cell phone calls, text messages, TV commercials, billboards, internet pop-ups, calls from our bosses and customers, and demands from our children, spouses, pets, and yes, even e-mail newsletters.

Get the picture? There's nowhere to hide anymore. It's like a swarm of bees chasing you, and each bee in the swarm wants something. No wonder life seems urgent!

Productivity Paradigm: 

Consider urgency to be a paradigm, a filtered view of life. "Things to do" are not intrinsically urgent. Urgency is an interpretation of the receiving party. If your boss comes to you with an "urgent request", it only becomes urgent in your life if you interpret it that way and agree to its urgency. Of course, you'll have your reasons for responding that way! We're not questioning your reasons. We're just pointing to the fact that unless you agree, it's not inherently urgent.

There are plenty of things that people want of you, that to them seem to be urgent. Yet to you they have no urgency - in your world, on your scale of significance, they don't occur as urgent.

Here's the thing about the paradigm of urgency. When you live in an environment where more is coming at you than you can comprehend, manage, or do, urgency becomes the unconscious habitual filter you use to process the priorities of things. By using that filter, eventually, everything you work on becomes urgent. You are relegated to working through one urgency after another. It becomes your habitual filter and motivation for what you do and don't do. Naturally, there will be "too much to do and not enough time to get it done." Urgency has become your default mode of operation!

Remember: For you to be affected by urgency, you must agree that it's urgent. Urgency is a way of viewing life, not a truth. By having everything occur as urgent, you are the victim of what's coming at you, and therefore, not responsible.

Copyright Mission Control Productivity Llc.

What People are Saying 

"I came into the workshop looking for a greater capacity to manage details. I knew that if I could do that, I could get more research done and I would also have more energy and more fun in doing the research.

"It worked! Just from Mission Control, I saved us from being a month behind schedule, which enabled us to do 40% more of an experiment. For me, science is about thinking deeply and clearly about things. That's what Mission Control provides. It's given me a greater ability to come up with clever ideas, which is the fun part about doing scientific research."

Bill Scuba 

Programmer Analyst, Large Scale Ocean Currents, Scripps Institution of Oceanography