It's not urgent
The art of knowing what can wait
In our daily work lives, we often struggle to distinguish between what feels urgent and what actually is. This challenge becomes even more complex when other start telling us what they think is urgent.
Consider this scenario:
A relatively new team member asks for a roll of stamps. The person responsible for picking up the stamps (let’s call them the stamp-person) doesn’t have time that day, and agrees to grab the stamps the next week. On Monday, the team member asks again. The stamp-person says they can have the roll by Wednesday. The team members asks if someone else (let’s call them the everything-else-person) could do it. The stamp-person checks with the everything-else-person, just to be sure they (the stamp-person) isn’t crazy. The everything-else-person says they don’t have time either, and that it isn’t urgent: just get it on Wednesday. On Wednesday afternoon, the team member checks in: “Are you bringing the stamps today?” The stamp-person messages back: “Yes, be there in 30.” The team member replies: “Thought you forgot about me.”
On its face, this single event reveals something deeper about how we perceive urgency. Maybe the team member was being lighthearted, or maybe they had undisclosed reasons for the urgency. The person responsible for the task might have been juggling competing priorities, while others tried to avoid being drawn into what they saw as a non-urgent matter.
It’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt at first, to assume good intentions. Because we never know which role we are going to play in situations like this. This time, are we going to play the role of the person who needs something done urgently? Or of the person whose job it normally is? Or of the person who is trying not to get roped in?
I want to persuade you of two things here. First, communication is hard. Words are a poor tool for conveying what is in our own minds to another person. Second, most tasks are not urgent. And I’m not even sure if I should be separating those two topics, because in this context they overlap significantly. It’s one thing to know whether something is urgent or not. It’s another thing to be able to have that conversation with another person.
Human beings are prediction machines. We are constantly predicting what the outcome of a given course of action might be. “If I do this, will they do that? If I do that, will they do this? What will happen if … ?” We are constantly in the process of constructing our reality and adjusting our mental model of how the people around us think and act, based on our experiences with them. Even those of us who claim to be the most logical and rational are somewhat misleading ourselves. The best we can hope for is to develop a good working representation of the people we are closest to think inside, based on what we notice from what they say and do.
So it follows that we have a duty to notice these things. To pick up on them when they happen, to notice our own internal emotional reactions to what is being said and done. To acknowledge that we might have a faulty representation in our heads of why others are behaving the way they do.
To understand the difference between perceived and actual urgency, let’s look at a concrete example. In a dental clinic, there are a few things that can bring work grinding to a halt. Loss of electricity (unless we have battery backups), loss of water (unless our chairs can be quickly switched from town water to bottled), a server going down (unless we have a backup). We can put plans in place that will help us get back up and running quickly, but regardless, these things are actually urgent. Without them, it isn’t just one person who is going to suffer: it’s everyone. Every dentist, hygienist, assistant and receptionist will stop being able to provide care for every patient coming through the door.
At the same time, having a list of non-urgent tasks (picking up office supplies, going through accounts, organizing storage areas) helps keep us connected to what’s happening at the clinic. These routine tasks create a rhythm to our work week. And precisely because they’re not urgent, they give us flexibility. They can wait a week if something more important comes up, or if someone’s sick for two days and we need to cover. Understanding which tasks fall into this category is just as important as recognizing true urgency.
What I’ve found is that, in general, a third of new team members sail through the first two years without any managerial conversations. They just “get it”. Yes, they need training on systems and on how we do things, the same as all of us. But they are self-motivated and self-managed, they don’t benefit from having anyone tell them what to do.
There is another third on the other side of the spectrum that “doesn’t get it”. They don’t think to greet the patient, help orient them and get them seated. They don’t think to sterilize equipment during downtime to avoid a backlog later. They also confuse non-urgent tasks with urgent ones. This third ideally doesn’t make it through the hiring process, and if they do, they don’t make it through probation. It isn’t a question of good people or bad people, it’s a question of fit.
What sets these thirds apart? I’m sure there are multiple factors, but two big ones are emotional maturity and work maturity. Emotional maturity develops naturally with age and experience, and can also be learned by watching others and by observing our own emotional states. A mature understanding of the work at hand develops by teaching oneself what the job needs. It can be kick-started with checklists and job descriptions, but at the end of the day, we teach ourselves what the job actually is by doing it.
The middle third is where things can get bogged down and we can lose time and energy. If we are giving people the benefit of the doubt (which we should), then it’s easy to predict that “things will go better when …”, with myriad ways to fill in that blank. Things will go better when we have stamps in the office. Things will go better when we have an understanding of routines. Things will go better. Right?
The follow-up question is, “Well, will they get good enough?” And that depends. It depends on the person’s willingness to learn the job. It depends on our ability to communicate that some things are urgent, but most things aren’t. It depends on learning to work together to figure out what’s important and what isn’t. All of this can be helped by recognizing that most things aren’t urgent, which gives us time and space to find a creative solution. It also means that when something truly needs to be done, we have already taken the time and space to have reached a creative solution, and we implement that quickly.
Some things in life are actually urgent, and bring everything to a sudden stop. The loss of someone close to us. The loss of our health. The loss of work that we find meaningful.
Most things are not. Understanding this distinction, and having the emotional maturity to communicate it, is essential to building effective workplace relationships. When we recognize that most tasks aren’t truly urgent, we create space for more creative solutions. It’s important to communicate that to the people around us.