Unpacking Urgency Culture – alive magazine

The pressures of pace

Urgency culture is the perceived expectation to respond, produce, and communicate quickly. It’s a kind of ever-present pressure to do the following:

• reply to requests, like texts, emails, and invitations
• be efficient with our work tasks―all day, every day
• fit it all in, all the time―and quickly (if not immediately)

Urgency culture is associated with increased pressure to get a job and to rise in the “ranks.” It can also be seen in the prioritization of workplace “agility”―the need for flexibility when it comes to new tools, systems, and work cultures that are changing at rapid-fire speed.

And this relentless rhythm of life has only intensified over the past few decades.

“It really is urgent:”―true or false?

With so much feeling, so pressing, so frequently, it can be hard to know what’s really urgent or not. With emails flying, there can be an impression of everything needing instant attention, quick turnarounds, and ever-faster responses. Yet while response times may make a task feel as though it’s urgent, the content, product, or project itself may not actually be all that time- sensitive. And when everything feels fast, there can be a busyness that halts true momentum.

The risks of an urgent rhythm

That relentlessness isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s no coincidence that, with the rise of urgency culture, occurrences of burnout have risen too.

If we’re always “on,” then we’re never “off”―never off the clock, never unreachable, never idle. Yet that idleness―that downtime, rest, and just being instead of doing―is a crucial component of health.

When we’re in a constant state of urgent movement, our mental health suffers in the form of unrelenting worry, high stress, and ultimately feeling overwhelmed. It might well be that what’s truly urgent is for us to slow down.

Where does the time go?

Apps, tips, and tools abound about how to “manage” our time―schedule boxing and blocking, task tracking and stacking, etc. But these systems are, in truth, superficial. What’s underneath our agendas and never-ending to-do lists? Time anxiety: the fear that we’re running out of time―and there’s so much to do.

The key to easing the grip of urgency is to understand the fundamental impossibility of doing all of our to-dos, and practising wise discernment through boundary-setting and prioritization.

The paradox of priorities

Often, we’re told that the solution to all-at-once, everything-urgent mode is to prioritize, t. To dump all our to-dos and shift key tasks to the top. This is superb in principle, but challenging in practice.

Why? Because to prioritize is to rank and sequence our to-dos according to importance, and the truth is, we all have many things that are important―to our families, communities, workplaces, and, importantly, to our own selves—such as our health, values, spiritual practices, and ambitions.

There’s more to priorities than urgency

One of the most common prioritization tools is called the Urgent/Important Method―aka The Eisenhower Matrix―whereby we tackle work by way of four quadrants:

1. What’s important + urgent (such as working on a high-stakes presentation to be given in three days)?
2. What’s important + not urgent (such as working on a big revenue-generating project to be launched in six months)?
3. What’s not important + urgent (such as working on an agenda that needs circulating tomorrow)?
4. What’s not important + not urgent (such as clearing your email inbox)?

The Priority Wheel

In search of a more humane, balanced, and sustainable take, I created my own system of prioritization: The Priority Wheel. It honours the fact that we have many things we HAVE to do, SHOULD do, WANT to do, that FEEL GOOD to do (whether we want to do them or not, such as a brisk walk outdoors), and that we AIM to do (as in, our big goals).