Charles Hummel, “Tyranny of the Urgent”
“Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”
The definition of urgent is: ”Calling for immediate attention.” A grease fire on the stove is urgent. A busted water line is urgent. Arterial bleeding is urgent. Providing aid to the victims of a car crash is urgent.Most of the things that call for our immediate attention are not, however, urgent. They might be important, but important and urgent aren’t the same thing.
We all know folks for whom everything is urgent. Every thought, every notion, every need they have is a matter of “most pressing urgency.” They’re insistent, demanding, and frequently belligerent. They create stress, whether they’re CEOs or customers, relatives or employees. These are the people who call and don’t leave a message, expecting you to call them back right away; the people who serial text until you respond; and the people who fail to silence their phones in meetings not once, but repeatedly and without apology, because their “urgent” outweighs everything else.
The trouble with urgency, whether it comes from the outside or from within (many of us have little inner tyrants who torment us), is that when we’re always “putting out fires” we’re not doing the important things, and when the important things don’t get done, the infrastructure of our lives starts to crumble.
Charles Hummel wrote “Tyranny of the Urgent” in the early 1980s — an era of landlines, snail mail, and computers whose programs were limited to what could be recorded on a cassette tape. I wonder what Hummel might have said about email, cell phones, text messaging and the internet. I suspect he would have deemed them tyrannical. There are more things than ever competing for our attention from morning to night (and in the middle of the night sometimes… put your phone in the other room, you’ll sleep better.)
It’s not that any of those things are bad, they’re just tools. They’re only bad when we allow them to be misused, when we fail to prioritize the important over the urgent.
It’s OK to slow down, take a deep breath, and maintain your boundaries. You are not subject to the tyranny of the urgent.
