Tradeoffs of doing urgent task instead of important

The issue of productivity

This whole series of notes became possible because of a deceptively simple question that my colleague posed to me, and we discussed it at length: What is productivity?

I for one don’t grasp the concept of productivity, or its sibling efficiency. In my world view, everything that is said about both concepts traces back to 1903, when Frederick Taylor published his treatise “Shop Management”¹. It is a short work, and it lays out the idea of productivity in oversimplified² terms: amount produced multiplied by time spent.

Modern management still leans heavily on this concept, and tallies hours of work, numbers of closed tickets, lines of written code, and so on. I can continue on and on, cataloguing what is being counted, but! This is a method a hundred years old, inherited from the industrial era, and we live, I would say, in a post-information society dominated not even by algorithms but by AI. Hence my assumption that the majority of office workers are engaged not in manual labour but in intellectual labour, which is notoriously difficult to quantify. This issue was also raised in the 60s by Drucker³, who was similarly searching for a way to measure intellectual productivity. But enough of this retrospection; I trust you grasp what I was discussing with my friend. And I have serious doubts that any of us (me, my friend, or even Drucker) can offer a feasible answer, but I tried to follow in Drucker’s footsteps and did my best to articulate the concept of productivity.

My friend, after our talk that left us with an open question, decided to check his assumption, stated like this: a productive person is doing more important tasks than urgent ones.

Fundamental flaw

Imagine that you are faced with the choice: to tackle the task your manager assigned you, which demands your immediate attention, or to turn to something more tedious⁴ — something you committed yourself to long ago, but which still requires effort. What would you do?

I would wager the former, because the pressure of an open loop⁵ is real: your boss/manager/supervisor expects completion of the task in due time. The task carries everything needed for successful completion: urgency, a clear timeframe, and a ledger of profits and losses⁶.

This is the fundamental flaw of our psychology: between an important task and an urgent one, we ALWAYS gravitate towards the urgent, and the reason is as simple as breathing.

Urgent tasks possess: a short⁷ completion window, a swifter reward (feedback), and — regardless of whether demand is low or high — an inflated perceived value. The result is that even a spurious task still gets done at the expense of an important one; and the reason for forsaking the important is as simple as the reason for seizing the urgent — almost identical.

Important tasks, by contrast: are far more difficult to complete, and stand much further from the greater payoff accomplishing them might yield⁸. And finally, the benefits appear less certain, which in turn erodes motivation along with perceived value.

I don’t truly know or understand how people weigh the tradeoffs between important and urgent tasks, but I can surmise that these tradeoffs yield suboptimal results. And how do I know this?

Let’s say I have some numbers that corroborate, in a certain fashion, our⁹ assumption. After our exchange on the issue of productivity, my friend ran a survey in which he asked respondents how many urgent tasks they do, and how many important ones. Their answers afforded an opportunity to draw an accurate (provisional) conclusion on what prompts a person to complete an urgent task instead of an important one — an unexpected discovery, which I discuss in the following note.

Spoiler: it’s not discipline, at least not the one I expected.

BIO