How to Prioritise When Everything Feels Urgent

Research & Sources / Leadership & Decision-Making

Imagine a house with ten doorbells, and all of them ring at once. You will probably run to the loudest one. But the loudest bell might be the pizza delivery, while the quiet one at the back door is your neighbour telling you the garage is on fire. When everything feels urgent, the loudest thing wins. That is rarely the most important thing.

Why urgent wins

Urgent things have a deadline, a person waiting or a ringing phone attached to them. Important things often have none of that. Building a better sales process, developing your team, thinking about next year’s direction: nobody calls you about these today.

So urgent work wins, day after day. And slowly, the important work turns urgent too, because it was ignored too long. Then it arrives as a crisis.

Our brains are built this way

Researchers Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee ran a series of experiments with a surprising result. People often chose a task simply because it had a short deadline, even when another task was clearly more valuable and had the same effort. They called this the mere urgency effect.¹ The feeling of urgency alone was enough to pull attention away from the better option.

So if you keep choosing the urgent thing, you are not weak. You are human. But knowing this pull exists is the first step to resisting it.

A simple sorting tool

A well-known way to sort tasks is often named after US President Eisenhower. You ask two questions about each task: is it urgent? Is it important? That gives four boxes.² It is a practical habit rather than a scientific finding, but it works well because it forces you to ask the second question at all.

• Urgent and important: do it now. A real crisis, a key client issue.
• Important, not urgent: plan it, give it fixed time. This is where most real progress lives.
• Urgent, not important: delegate it or answer it quickly, with minimum effort.
• Neither: drop it.

Three questions that cut through the noise

“What happens if I do this next week instead?” If the honest answer is “nothing much”, it is not truly urgent.

“Which of these moves my most important result?” If you have one clear main outcome for the quarter, this question becomes easy to answer.

“Who else could do this?” Many urgent tasks are urgent for someone else, not necessarily for you.

Protect the important before the day starts

The day will always fill up with urgent things. So the important work needs to be placed first, like big stones in a jar before the sand. Put one important task in your calendar every morning, before the inbox opens. When the bells start ringing, the most valuable work is already underway.

What this means for you this week

• List everything on your plate and sort it into the four boxes.
• Delete or delegate at least three items from the bottom two boxes.
• Book two fixed slots for one important, non-urgent task.
• Ask the “next week” question every time something new feels urgent.

Every bell rings. You still get to choose which door to open.

Sources

1. Zhu, M., Yang, Y. & Hsee, C. K. (2018). The Mere Urgency Effect. Journal of Consumer Research. doi.orgPeople tend to choose urgent tasks over important ones with larger rewards, simply because they feel time-limited.
2. Wikipedia. Time management: The Eisenhower Method. en.wikipedia.orgSorting tasks by urgent and important. A practical tool rather than a research finding.