The Trouble with Urgency

There are urgent things and there are important things. It has been said that urgent things are often the reason that important things don’t get done.

 You can drain years responding to urgent things and, as a result, fail to make meaningful progress on the important things. Eventually you may even find yourself rationalizing away those important things in favour of adopting hyper-responsiveness and hustle your branded advantage. 

 The truth is most urgent things (when viewed in retrospect) did not prove to be all that critical.  By contrast, failure to understand and accomplish the one or two really important things, makes companies weak, stuck and eventually dead. 

 We push off important things in small increments. A day at a time or week at a time; and often we keep doing it. It’s easy because there is often no immediate punishment. 

 Urgent things, on the other hand are loaded with palpable, anxiety-provoking, uncomfortable threats: like looking bad, losing confidence, or just plain getting caught with your pants down. So it takes a lot of resilience and emotional regulation to avoid conferring upon them rapid and disproportionate levels of priority.

 For the most part, people don’t cherish those times they dropped everything to go run into the latest fire. But  those times we stayed focused on what was important, while calmly absorbing  the bumps along the way,  is something we always feel good about. 

In 1861, Thomas Crapper was hired by Prince Edward (later King Edward VII) to construct lavatories in several royal palaces. He patented a number of toilet-related inventions that would minimize the time and distraction of relieving oneself.