Strategies to Control Urgency, Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity
Urgent! (2021) is your guide to getting the right things done at the right time. In our fast-paced world, it’s easy to fall into the urgency trap – and keeping up with the constant demands often feels impossible. But by learning to consciously replace reactive behaviors with proactive ones, you can reduce stress and do deeper, more effective work.
Dermot Crowley is a productivity guru who’s helped both individuals and organizations maximize their work potential for over 25 years. He’s an author, speaker, trainer, thought leader, and the founder of Adapt Productivity. His other books are Smart Work and Smart Teams.
You’re a hard worker. You take pride in being an effective team member and doing your job well. And sometimes, you feel like a chicken running around without a head.
Yes, no, maybe so? Research published in the 2018 Journal of Applied Psychology reveals that 40 percent of Americans experience anxiety during their workday, and 72 percent say it affects their work and personal lives. Technology, without a doubt, plays a big part. The level at which we’re now all connected has resulted in a constant flow of information and a pace that’s impossible to keep up with.
To meet these urgent demands, we’re always busy, always panicked, always rushing to deliver – but never truly effective. This inevitably leads to burnout, and a blow to our physical and mental well-being. It also results in missed deadlines, rework, and attrition – all of which are costly to business.
The key message here is: Senseless urgency hurts your well-being and productivity levels.
But guess what? Many of those things marked “urgent” are just like the emperor and his new clothes – that is, they’re not what they seem. The Oxford English Dictionary defines urgency as “importance requiring swift action.” But in today’s workplace, “urgent” has become synonymous with anything slightly time-sensitive – whether or not it’s important. This unnecessary urgency creates stress and distraction, which is why it’s called unproductive urgency.
There are two types of unproductive urgency: fake and avoidable. Fake urgency can be self-inflicted, like reacting to a message you know wasn’t actually urgent. Research shows that even a brief interruption takes up to 20 minutes to recover from. Other times, it’s external; your colleague has sent a series of emails with subject lines escalating from “urgent” to “URGENT!” to “REALLY URGENT!” He knows if he’s loud enough, he’ll get what he wants.
Then there’s avoidable urgency. That’s when there’s real urgency – but only because something could’ve been avoided and wasn’t. This results from things like procrastination, disorganization, overcommitting, or poor time management. In both cases, say goodbye to your planned workday.
It’s time to call urgency’s bluff. To help mitigate your own potentially unproductive approach to urgency, the author proposes “The Urgency Playbook” – a set of ten principles and strategies that are sprinkled throughout these blinks.
First up: Don’t cry wolf. In other words, don’t act as though something’s urgent if it’s not. Save urgency for when it’s truly important, time-critical, and unavoidable. With email, for example, imagine there’s an urgency token system: you get five urgent requests per month. When you run out, that’s it – unless you want to get eaten by your colleagues!
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