Before diving into this week’s edition… I’m thrilled (and a little nervous) to announce The Art of Imperfect Action, a live online masterclass in two two-hour sessions I’ll be offering over one weekend in mid-January. This is an opportunity both to go deep and get practical about the ideas I’ve been exploring in this newsletter. Or, as the website explains: “Discover a toolbox of practices for finding focus in the midst of infinite demands, making satisfying progress on what really matters, and giving up the fight against time.” If these newsletters strike a chord with you, I do hope you’ll consider purchasing a ticket, for yourself or as a holiday gift.
Urgency doesn't exist
There’s surely no more cliched complaint, when it comes to howwe spend our time, than that we end up investing too much of it in what’s urgent, when we ought to be focused on what’s important instead. And the “tyranny of the urgent” is more than a matter of mistaken priorities. For me, at least, “urgency” is a whole state of mind, indeed of body: the anxious knot in the stomach, the clenched jaw, the furrowed brow. Life becomes a grim and unrelenting matter of “getting through” tasks, getting them “out of the way” – and putting any thought of, you know, actually enjoying things indefinitely on hold until it’s all done.
(And then there’s the self-reproach: the tetchy inner critic berating you for having neglected these tasks sufficiently for them to have become urgent in the first place.)
The usual solution to this urgency-versus-importance dilemma mainly just involves trying to force yourself to do more of the important stuff. Sometimes, the advice is to “develop a sense of urgency” around what’s important – which, to those of us in the knot-in-the-stomach camp, has got to be one of the least appetising productivity tactics ever devised: you want us to increase the number of things we’re feeling stressed about?
But I want to propose a radically different solution. What if, on closer inspection, urgency isn’t what it seems? What if – contrariarism alert! – urgency doesn’t even really exist?
The first and most obvious sense in which urgency isn’t what it seems is that virtually none of the things that generate that knot-in-the-stomach feeling are the matters of life-or-death we tend to assume. By the strictest definition of the word “need”, they don’t actually need doing before anything else. Astonishing as it can seem to the people-pleasers of the world, replies to text messages can be delayed, deadlines can be missed, commitments can be flaked on. There may well be consequences to this kind of neglect, and those consequences can be much worse for some people than others. But the malevolent force we call “urgency” wants you to think that the fate of the universe rests upon each of them. And it never does.
(Contrast the feeling of urgency to the very different experience of an emergency, when you simply do, unquestionably, have to rush someone to hospital, stop the water leaking from the bathroom to the kitchen, or get the company website back online. Such moments are often strangely calm – perhaps because there’s suddenly zero psychological conflict about how you ought to be using your time.)
There’s something even weirder going on with urgency, though. Consider the famous “Eisenhower matrix”, popularized by Stephen Covey, a two-by-two grid intended to show that all tasks are some combination of urgent or non-urgent and important or non-important:
According to Covey, it’s “quadrant three”, theurgent but non-important, that dominates far too much of our time. But hold on. What does “urgent but non-important” even mean? How can something need doing quickly if it doesn’t need doing at all? If it doesn’t need doing, it’s not urgent; and if it does need doing, it’s important.
This conundrum is reflected in the usual advice about what to do with quadrant three tasks, which is that they ought to be delegated to others. Well, OK, yes: some things are better done by other people. But delegation isn’t always an option. And besides, if a task is truly unimportant, it’s not clear why anyone is doing it anyway.
The way through this muddle begins, I think, by seeing that what we call “urgency” is actually just another kind of importance – not some separate, stress-inducing quality that attaches itself to certain tasks, demanding their immediate completion. And definitely, time-sensitivity is one of the factors that can make a task worth prioritising. Deadlines do matter, whether you’re paying a bill, launching a product, buying a birthday present or leaving for the school run. But time-sensitivity is one factor among many. There’s no need to think of urgency as some uniquely powerful force that gets to muscle its way in front of everything else.
If this strikes you as a purely conceptual distinction, I can only respond that, for me, it’s been transformative. It helps me see the truth of my situation, which is that every day, when I wake up, there are thousands upon thousands of genuinely important ways I could spend my day – certainly incalculably more than I’ll have time for. So much matters! Meaningful work matters. My relationships with my wife and son and friends matter. Paying the bills matters. Cleaning the house matters. Rest matters. Fun matters.
And somehow, the sheer overwhelming number of things that matter has the effect of cutting “urgency” down to size. Because I’m finite, my task for the day can only possibly be to do a few things that matter. Inevitably, a far greater number of things that matter will fall by the wayside – doubtless including a few that derived their importance from their time-sensitivity.
Oh well: such is the human condition.
This shift of perspective also helps me see how frequently my sense ofwhat’s urgent is really a matter of someone else’s priorities or anxieties. Too often, my unquestioned assumption is that because someone else would like something doing soon, it “needs doing” soon.
But that doesn’t follow. It’s not that other people’s priorities don’t count at all. It’s just that they needn’t obliterate all other considerations. They can be weighed in the balance. And sometimes, someone else’s disappointment or continued impatience may be a price worth paying.
Perhaps another way of saying all this is that from a certain angle, isn’t everything time-sensitive? As I may possibly have mentioned somewhere before, you’ll get about four thousand weeks on the planet if you’re lucky. And so, in fact, a hike with an old friend, or an hour with a good novel in front of a fire, is as urgent a potential use of today as anything could be. Soon enough, the opportunity to do such things will be gone forever.
And if it’s all time-sensitive… well, the stomach-knotting power of what normally gets classified as “urgent” fades a bit, doesn’t it? Clearly, getting all the time-sensitive things “out of the way first” is impossible. And clearly, you’ll be going to bed tonight with a million important things not done. OK. Great! With that battle decisively lost, there’s no need to fight it anymore. Instead, you get to ask: what might be an interesting, useful, and enlivening way to spend these hours?
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I’m tempted to put one of those “buy now!”countdown clocks here, because it would be funny to end a newsletter questioning the very idea of urgency with a high-pressure sales pitch. Instead, I’ll just remind you that there’s more about my January masterclass The Art of Imperfect Action over here. Thank you!