A simple tool that lifts the weight of urgency

The last time I mentioned that urgent tasks inflate their own perceived value, I didn’t grasp the full weight of it. Perhaps THE sole thing urgency inflates is perceived value — and that alone is what compels us to act on the urgent task, regardless of the cost to the important ones we already hold.

It is notoriously difficult to assess how people negotiate the tradeoff between urgent and important, but if anything, there might be an explanation from Zeigarnik — though more on that later. What I know for certain is what those who tend to pursue the more important and less urgent tasks actually do, and it turns out it is not rocket science either.

Our tendency to defer the important when confronted with the urgent goes far beyond rational explanation¹. I think the very nature of urgency decides for us: a compressed time frame, a narrow window in which to make a decision (to act or not to act), and a heightened attention that diverts focus from the tasks — the important ones — whose completion might yield far greater outcomes.

We are only humans, an excuse I allow myself in the voice of Agent Smith from the Matrix trilogy. We are predisposed, and designed², to feel psychological discomfort from something incomplete³: a task, a meeting, an almost finished book, an unfinished sentence, something that we t

You know the feeling⁴. I believe a compressed time frame is more than enough to make us dismiss the irrelevant cues an urgent task carries. But it turns out that is not the case for everyone.

A small experiment

There is a particular breed of people who perceive urgent tasks for what they are — less relevant — and they differ from those who chase the urgent in just one thing: before doing anything, they … Oh, we will get to what they do. First, a little data from a real-life survey⁵.

A friend of mine⁶, a specialist in procrastination and a corporate consultant, devised an ingenious but simple survey⁷. The survey opened by asking how many urgent tasks the respondents had, and how many important ones⁸. The audience, drawn primarily from IT specialists with an interest in productivity, completed the survey online. 434 submitted their answers.

After the question about the number of urgent and important tasks, they had to answer the real question that intrigued him and, by extension, me: how did you arrive at the count of urgent versus important tasks that you had? Did you draw the number from memory, or did you consult your notes (something you had explicitly written down)?

N=392 answered from memory and N=42 consulted their notes. For those who answered from memory, the average number of urgent tasks was 1.9 and important tasks 1.7. For those who consulted notes: urgent tasks 1.5 and important tasks, a striking 2.3. This all leads me to a tentative conclusion that, possibly, writing — which slows a person down — diminishes the perceived value of an urgent task. Writing, and slowing down, may be the natural antidote to doing unimportant work. I have a personal anecdote to support this conclusion.

Three-nail rule

I used to work as a corporate manager, and the higher my position climbed, the more urgent tasks tended to be offloaded onto me by people I didn’t know, who held no interest for me — plainly, just strangers. At some point I noticed that throughout the day I was doing nothing but the tasks handed to me by somebody else. The tasks that I was being told were urgent. After lingering long hours once the office had emptied, I learned that my mental health matters far more than being polite and endlessly accommodating. And I devised a strategy I call the three-nail rule. The gist in one sentence: the more urgent the task, the slower I will do it.

When a colleague⁹ approached me with an urgent task, I told them OK, I’ll do it, and set the task somewhere on my desk. Then, when they approached me again asking whether I had completed it, I told them I was working on it at that very moment — and forwarded the task in question to my assistant¹⁰.

Usually at this point the perceived urgency noticeably wanes for the person, and on the second day there is no rush, and the one who asked begins tackling the task himself. In a week or so, they call and ask me about “the urgent task,” to which I say that Misha¹¹ reckons he will wrap it up by the end of the day¹², to which the universal response is “Don’t bother, we already did it ourselves.”

End of story.

The more urgent the task, the slower I will do it. Faced with something difficult or urgent, pause and think. Am I the best-suited person for this task? Is this task within my pay grade? What is my place and role in the company, and does it align with the task I am being asked to do?

BIO