Urgent Is Not the Way

Mid fire drill, Midjourney

Not the way to get promoted, not the way to build a business, not the way to do the good work.
Written by someone who's done none of the above.
jk, I've occasionally gotten promoted.

Disclosure: I wrote about some first principles for good product marketing, and this post is an expansion on one of those ideas, because being derivative is easier than being original, and I’m lazy today.

In this essay, I’m going to argue that doing “urgent” work is inefficient at best and bad for your career at worst. So that I don’t have to hedge and qualify every other sentence, I’m factoring out the caveats from the main body and putting one up front.

Caveat Lector (Reader Beware): I’m not saying that you should never do urgent work; I’m just saying you’re probably doing too much of it. If product is flying off the literal or figurative shelves, if you open the doors to your proverbial shop and are immediately trampled to death by ravenous customers in scenes out of early 2000's Black Friday news reels, then you should be urgently creating more of the product. On the Explore-Exploit continuum, Pure Exploit does exist, and if you should be so lucky as to find yourself in that position, then you should urgently mine that vein as fast and deep as you possibly can.

I think situations like the above are relatively rare. The proliferation of urgent work in Corporate America arises more from poor management than from the drive to exploit advantages before the market/competitors/authorities get wise.

The actual start of the essay

I used to like drills. There we'd be, sitting at our little desks, and the end-of-period bell would start ringing, except it wasn't the end of the period. What would it be this time? Earthquake? Duck, cover, and hold. Fire? Check the air for smoke, check the door for heat (if hot, put a rolled up towel or shirt, preferably wet, at the bottom of the door), and then proceed in an orderly line out the building to the designated rally point. You personally are on fire? Initiate the iconic Stop, Drop, and Roll.

We drilled a few times a year. I enjoyed school, but I appreciated getting 20 minutes knocked off of math class every now and again. (My theory re: my lack of math proficiency is that I took a wrong turn at Pre-Algebra and never quite found my way back.)

We humans do drills to re-engineer our default human response in situations where the default response will endanger others or ourselves. Drills are practice. They are training. For the moments when it's both urgent and important that we get it right.

Disaster never tested us at school, so I don't know whether our fire drill maneuvers would have helped or if I would have panicked (default response) and elbowed my friends in the head while sprinting for the exit. There's just no way to be sure until you've lived it.

But I think they increased our collective probability of making it out alive.

From fire drills to “fire drills”

Corporate fire drills are never fun and rarely involve training. I'm not talking about the kind where you climb down 27 flights of stairs in a single file line and discover that a lot of different kinds of people work in your building. I'm talking about the kind where the irony is right there in the jargon. Because they don't tell us it's a fire drill. They tell us there's a fire. They tell us it's both extremely urgent and extremely important. Stop what you're doing, grab a hose, and let's save the day.

Except we know the fire isn’t real. No one's day is getting saved, except maybe the person's who pulled the alarm. So we call faux urgency by a name we learned around the time when they first made us sit at desks all day: fire drill.

Urgent work is a scourge, specifically the false urgency that writes Corporate America's day-to-day to-do list. You could call it A Scourgency. Or not.

Whatever you call it, the poison is in the dose. A little fake urgency every now and again to keep the troops sharp and "change-ready" could be good. A culture of "right now" where relative urgency is the dominant prioritization framework? Teams operating that way eventually lose the ability to tell what's important (because they don’t practice) and the ability to tell what's urgent (because everything is). When that happens, you and your business are well and truly f*cked. You may as well be playing Battleship.

F*cked how, exactly?

How? Now.

For one, good people burn out. (Huh, I guess there's a lot of figurative "fire" language in our corporate parlance). A steady roar of urgent, non-important work is a great way to demotivate en masse. More on this in a moment.

The costs to you as an employee

For you as a single worker or employee, constantly doing urgent work is bad for your career because the ability to do urgent work is a commodity.

Anyone can do urgent work. I do mean this, but what I also mean is: anyone can motivate themselves to do urgent work. Procrastinators (hello, fellow travelers) will intuitively understand this point. For the non-procrastinators, it has to do with the instant gratification of smaller tasks and the anxiety of missing a deadline outweighing the anxiety of getting started.

When managers say, "you need to take more ownership" they're really saying, "you need to do important work that isn't urgent. You need to apply your energy and intelligence over a longer period of time to build something of value or figure out who is lighting all these fires."

Nothing you do in an hour, a day, or a week, is going to get you promoted.*

The longer you stay working on the Urgent pile, laboring under the myth that one day you'll get to the bottom of it and you can finally do the important things — the longer you do that, the more your ability to work on non-urgent tasks will erode. Why does it erode? Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, interviewed some smart doctors on this topic:

“If we stop exercising our mental skills,” writes [Dr. Norman Doidge, a brain plasticity researcher], “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.” Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s medical school, terms this process “survival of the busiest.”

Said another way, also by Nicholas Carr, “The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.” Your brain decays away from the hard and thoughtful and as such, away from Non-Urgent Important.

The costs to you as an manager

How about you as a manager? There's a reason that management-by-fire-drill is so widespread: it works, for a while. Telling your team the building is on fire and then gesticulating at the exits is a good way to get everyone moving. But, as referenced above, people eventually burn out. They stop doing the little things that smooth the rough edges of an organization, then they stop doing the bigger things, then they leave.

Even for those who continue to do good-enough work to stay, the culture of urgency gives them an evergreen pass to be mediocre. Everyone has a blanket excuse to half-ass what they're working on, and some may practice malicious compliance as disillusionment mounts. The world of faux urgency is the world of "The operation was a success, but the patient died."

A quick management aside: "vision" is so prized in leaders because it's the jargon for inspiring people (read: getting them to work harder) without threatening them. Having a vision is having a positive framing of the future that you're good at sharing. Clear visions also have the advantage of nudging followers into longer-term thinking. Leaders with vision are usually described as "charismatic." The ceiling is higher but the floor is lower with charismatic leaders (probability of hitting the ceiling vs. the floor or the points in between is not necessarily uniformly distributed).

Recall that the point of drills is to change the intuitive response to something more adaptive. The problem with corporate fire drills is they reinforce a poor intuitive response, which is slapdash work, done but resented.

The costs to you as a business (businesses are people too)

And it’s bad for your organization for a host of reasons, the most glaring of which is incorrect prioritization.

Here’s an illustrative 2x2, the favored visual aid of those who struggled with Pre-Algebra:

The work that will differentiate your company will be the work in Quadrant 4 (the one in which I drew cute yellow stars). If your company is not defensibly differentiated, it may as well not exist. And if you lose sight of what's important or can't protect your brain and your team enough to prioritize that work, you'll miss your Moment.

At some point, the opportunity to do A Really Important Thing will pass, but it will pass silently. The alarms will go off, but you won't hear them, because they've been going off for the last 7 months and your brain has mercifully begun to tune them out. And you will fail silently, a particularly pernicious kind of failure, because the rest of the system cannot respond to a silent failure, which means that, in complex and tightly-coupled systems like businesses, silent failures propagate, and by the time you realize that you really should have been paying attention, the Moment will have passed.

A parting vision and wish

May you find a happy home in Quadrant 4.
May you be ready for your Moment, when it comes.
May you be ready for the day when the alarms blare like always but this time the fire burns so hot that you don't even bother trying to make out the distorted PA voice because you already know that "This is NOT a drill…"

Notes:

*Consulting, investment banking, and lawyering are maybe the only prestigious corporate jobs where you can get promoted several times while only working on urgent things. They are famously punishing. And eventually, if you want to have equity in the business, you need to sell work, an activity that suffers under urgency. It's a change from just-in-time to just-in-case, and a lot of really strong managers hit the screen because they can't make this mindset shift.