The Urgency Quandary And Why Urgent Work Makes You Miserable
The loud cries of life’s urgencies incessantly call for action, but the quiet whisper of the important is what you might just measure your life against.
As the year draws to a close my mind is naturally turning towards a more reflective state. And one of the questions that’s been bubbling to the surface is this:
What proportion of my work this year has been intentional and important and what proportion has been urgent and reactive?
The two aren’t mutually exclusive – you can handle urgent tasks while making time for long term important but not urgent tasks. But more often than I’ve liked this year, I’ve found myself in a reactive state working on the urgent, sadly I fear, at the expense of the important.
I’d image there’s a less than trivial proportion of people who grapple with this quandary. There are many reasons why we find ourselves prioritising the urgent over the important, but my hunch is that one of the main forces behind this, is our human drive to eliminate pain.
I want to make significant career progress in the next 8 to 9 months. But if today I have to complete a tedious set of tasks to eliminate the noise from some important stakeholders, then that’s what I might just spend my time doing instead of working on impactful drivers of progress.
I might want to start that online teaching side-hustle but if I don’t make the pain of not achieving that long term goal tangible and relatable to today, or an actionable philosophy for today, the noise of the urgent will drown out the signal – the signal of what is truly important.
Until I take some time to reflect at the end of this year, the question persists - what proportion of my work this year has been intentional and important and what proportion has been urgent and reactive?
The Mere Urgency Effect
Studies show that when faced with the option to pursue an important task with long term or far distant pay-offs, versus pursuing a task with an associated urgency, we’re more likely to perform the urgent task, even if the urgency is not justified.
This is problematic in two ways.
Urgent Work Makes Us Miserable
Happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential – Shawn Achor.
Self-determination theory is a concept in psychology that suggests that people need to feel autonomy, competence and connection to others in order to achieve psychological growth. One of the key assumptions in this theory is that autonomous motivation is important and people need to feel in control of their own behaviors and goals. In brief people need to feel an internal sense of motivation.
Usually, when we do urgent work, we’re in practice working in response to an extrinsic motivation - we’re usually working in a reactive state in response to the needs of others. Even if we were already intending to do something, an imposed sense of urgency arguably takes away from our sense of intrinsic motivation. Anyone who’s ever had an item that was already on their to do list suddenly imposed on them 2 weeks earlier than planned can relate to this. Anyone who’s felt the emptiness of excessive hours spent in the email inbox responding to the demands of others can relate to this.
The evidence is more than anecdotal – urgency puts us in a state of reaction, which takes away from our sense of autonomy and control over our behavior and goals, which reduces the joy we feel when doing our work. It takes away from our experience of life generally.
Urgency Is Bad For Productivity
Urgent tasks are by definition concerned with the here and now. It might be important work that’s been put off for too long. It might be day-to-day tasks that simply need doing, that have been put off for too long. It might be the necessary but unenjoyable work that we’ve put off for too long.
The common denominator is that urgent work is associated with things that have been put off for so long that the necessity for their completion can no longer be put off for any longer – the loud cries of urgency are just too agonizing to bear. Something has either fallen through the preverbal cracks or has simply caught us off guard.
The mechanics of how we get into the cycle of urgency require their own conversation but one thing is clear – the cycle of urgency can be a place void of joy that periodically blinds us to the things that hold true meaning to us.
The Productivity Compass
One thing that can help us escape the pitfalls of urgent work is to define a philosophy for our productivity to serve as a compass for our everyday work. During periods where I’ve maintained balance and made progress on meaningful goals (while keeping the day-to-day in check), this has been the basis upon which I’ve functioned. Simply put the philosophy has been that:
I make time for meaningful progress on my quarterly goals while making sure I keep trivial but necessary tasks ticking along.
A statement like this does two things:
A. It acknowledges the need to make time for important needle moving work.
B. It acknowledges the messiness and unfairness of life in that often you just can’t get around the fact that there will be trivial or unenjoyable stuff that just needs doing.
I’ll get into the mechanics and the in-the-weeds systems I use for managing this on a granular day-to-day hour-by-hour basis in another post but that’s pretty much it. The philosophy is to:
- Maintain visibility of values and long-term goals.
- Carry out quarterly, monthly and weekly planning.
- Manage day-to-day progress and balance through trusted systems like routinising, time-blocking and fully capturing the to-do’s.
As the year draws to a close, I’ll do well to reflect on how well I’ve followed my compass this year. Thankfully the whisper of what’s truly meaningful hasn’t been drowned out by the noise of urgency completely.
References
1. Article/Study - The Mere Urgency Effect - Zhu, Meng; Yang, Yang
https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/45/3/673/4847790?redirectedFrom=fulltext
