The Urgency Illusion: Are You Running Around with Your Hair on Fire? Here’s Why!
The urgent has obscured the important if you’re constantly running around with your hair on fire.
Distracted leaders finish a few ‘small’ tasks before doing important work.
Stop saying, “Let me finish these small items.” We all know that ‘later’ never comes.
Leaders who do important things end up doing fewer urgent things. For example, if you do the important work of training, you deal with fewer urgencies.
2 kinds of problems:
“President Eisenhower used to arrange his affairs so that only the truly important and urgent matters came across his desk. He reportedly discovered that the two seldom went together.” Winnipeg Free Press
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
The urgency illusion:
People tend to choose urgent tasks they can complete quickly and put off important tasks that take longer to complete. (The Mere Urgency Effect)
The busier you feel, the more likely you are to neglect important work.
It seems easier and faster to do it yourself.
Busy leaders tend to ‘do it themselves’ rather than equip someone else to do it. Leaders who are consumed by urgencies believe they don’t have time to equip people to do some of their tasks.
Frantic leaders chase their own tails.
4 kinds of tasks:
Quadrant 1 Activities:
- Pressing deadlines.
- Customer requests.
- Answering “important” questions.
- Crisis situations.
Quadrant 2 activities:
- Relationship building.
- Coaching and training others.
- Personal development.
- Rest and recreation.
- Planning and strategizing.
- Exercise.
- Medical checkups.
Quadrant 3 activities:
- Disruptions. Answering questions.
- Recurring issues that others should handle.
- Some meetings.
- Some emails.
- Scheduling.
- Decisions that should be pressed down the chain of command.
Quadrant 4 activities:
- Surfing the Internet.
- Office drama.
- CC’d items.
In an age when running around with your hair on fire is desired and admired, important work gets pushed aside.
How might leaders escape the trap of confusing urgent with important?
Wow! Great post Dan. It seems the urgent is the enemy of the important.
Thanks Duane. Who would have thunk it? 🙂
How might leaders escape the trap of confusing urgent with important? Having the understanding what we we can and can’t do. Taking a realistic approach at what a task takes to complete? Who can do the task? When do they want it done? We can only do as much as we have individuals available to get things done. Sometimes you have to say “No” and seek someone else. When you’re in the Client business you bend as best you can because when you push them away they may not come back. “The Bread must be on the table before we can feed” ! These all fall under the work process, when we get to the life process outside of work, I have found the need to prioritize works the best for me. How important is it? Can we get by with not doing it? Who or what am I affecting if I don’t do it? Aren’t we so lucky to have choices? What about those who have no choice?….. Hmmm
Thanks Tim. Your acknowledgement that being able to establish priorities reflects good fortune is important.
You always chase urgencies if you can’t say ‘no’. Such an important observation.
#1 Quadrant 1 is problematic to me. Why is the deadline “pressing?” In over-busy environments, people seem to put deadlines on things to expedite them, to trip my Q1 R1 trigger. “What’s driving the date?” I often ask. Or I’ll counter, “I’m not able by Friday, but I will have it to you next Tuesday.” I feel for project managers who have to “manage to” unrealistic plans, though. How do you start to change an environment where everyone starts everything and hopes for the best?
Thanks Robert. I’m glad that you point out the use of deadlines to create urgency. Of course, some deadlines are valid. My intent was to focus on a legitimate deadline. If the deadline is near and the work is important then, for goodness sake, get it done.
However, your insights protect us from artificial urgency. Glad you stopped in today.
“What’s the driving the date?” Great question. I’m going to borrow it. So often deadlines are arbitrary. Thanks!
I try to eliminate (not delegate) tasks that end up in Q-4.
If you are always putting out fires (urgent issues) you are dealing with symptoms of a broken or inefficient processes. Fix the process and a lot of the urgent issues will go away.
Post your high priority. most important tasks on your office wall as a constant reminder of what needs your time and attention.
Thanks Paul. I’m with you. I need constant reminders. I’m a chipmunk on steroids.
“The urgent has obscured the important if you’re constantly running around with your hair on fire.” If everything is an emergency than nothing is. The point that changed me occurred in 1993 working at a Nuclear Plant north of NYC. I had a lot of tasks and challenges on my plate and my supervisor set me straight. He said, “Roger this is not life and death, I know what life and death is so stop treating it as so”. He could say this because he was a Navy Medic in Vietnam in 68/69 and he saw life and death challenges everyday. That day and that training helped me going forward. I just have to stop take a breath and remember that life training every day.
Powerful Roger. Thank you for sharing your story. A little perspective goes a long way.
One simple thing you can do right now that will help focus your attention: Create an email folder called Check Later. Set up an email rule that sends any email on which you are a cc into that folder. Because those emails aren’t cluttering up your inbox, they aren’t clamoring for your attention. At first, restrict yourself to only reading the emails in that folder twice a day: mid-morning and mid-afternoon. You will eventually learn that you can cut that back to once a day or even less frequently.
Brilliant, Jennifer. My experience indicates that removing clutter and distraction enables me to focus on important work.
I just did this. Trying it out. Thanks!
I have also done the same for certain people/email addresses, with their own folders. Helps me prioritize.
Confusing urgent with important is a folly many leaders fall for. Your quote about urgent tasks being passed along, but important items being done or scheduled is a fascinating factor for figuring out what you can do and what you do not have to do. Scheduling time for the the work that is important I think will alleviate a lot of that stress that there are too many tasks to get done. Passing on what can be urgent but not important to someone who is capable will make that work seem less urgent and that leader/manager can get the important tasks done.
Thanks Adam. I wish you well with your schooling.
An issue is what constitutes urgent and important is not fixed, or even consistent across an organisation. What I think is urgent and import, and what HR think is urgent and important very seldom align…
Urgent and important are hard to define. Someone who prefers intense personal control of everything may tend to think everything is urgent and important. Someone with a more laissez-faire attitude may not see many things as urgent or important to them. I prefer to make long to-do lists. Whether it is business or personal, each item has relevant information noted with it: due date, costs, opportunities, possible damages, etc. I then rank some of the items for the day or week in order of necessity. Typically, I aim to complete a handful of quick tasks, along with one or two time consuming tasks. The next day or week I create another list, to include uncompleted tasks from the previous list with updated information. Time frames are adjusted, as well as possible damages. The new list then gets ranked as well for what needs to be completed next. This “living” list, similar to a “running” job hazard analysis, reduces the pressure inherent in “important or urgent” tasks. Bar an unforeseen emergency, tasks get done at a relaxed pace.
In the age of COVID meetings and emails, we need to recognize the urgency illusion more than ever. Because many of us are working from home and disconnected from the office environment, we are cc’ing more on emails “to keep everyone in the loop” or inviting more people to meetings so that they can collaborate when their presence may not add any contributions. The dramatic increase in the use of teaming technology tools in the past year does offer some ways to get out of the urgency/important trap. My project cohort utilizes Microsoft Teams to share files, notes, and chats. When making changes to the file structure or adding a new workstream, I simply log the action in the Teams “posts” section or make additions in the “wiki.” This helps reduce the number of “FYI”-type emails we send back and forth, reducing email box clutter, and keeping emails clear for action-necessary tasks or urgent needs. We only cc people on emails if they ask to be kept informed in that way. Skype messages are used for urgent or routine needs but phone calls or text messages are reserved for immediate and urgent needs. By compartmentalizing our work by the tools used, it helps to communicate the urgency/importance of a piece of information or request based on how it was delivered.
Organizing tasks always helps me understand what needs to be completed first. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed which can lead to not accomplishing anything. I like the old saying with how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The four-quadrant breakdown is a great activity to break down important, urgent and tasks. I took an employee development course and we spent some of the class time using this same quadrant breakdown, but with the idea of where our time is spent. We wrote out various ways we can spend time each day and which quadrant it would fall under. The goal was to spend as little of time in the fourth quadrant with the ideal goal of spending time in the first quadrant. The 4 tasks breakdown in the blog takes the quadrants even further with the idea of Do, Schedule, Delegate and Delete. These ideas are key to be a successful manager of time and people.
This is very useful knowledge
Thanks