Everything feels urgent at work! At some point in their career, almost every founder or operator feels like everything at work is pressing, critical, or urgent. The inbox is full. Slack pings demand immediate attention. Meetings fill up your calendar. Tasks stack up faster than you can cross them off. When this happens, it’s easy to conclude that your business is fundamentally chaotic or that you’re not cut out for leadership.
Before we dive deeper, it’s important to recognize that this feeling is normal. Perceived urgency is not a failure of character or an indictment of your ability as a leader. You need to look at it as a psychological phenomenon with well-documented roots in how humans and organizations behave under pressure.
Research in management and psychology shows that people tend to prioritize tasks labeled as urgent because the brain is wired to respond to immediacy and short deadlines. The catch: they do these based on the perception of urgency and not whether the task really is urgent. Investigators call this the “mere urgency effect,” where individuals are more likely to choose tasks with shorter completion windows, even if the outcomes are objectively lower-value than other tasks that could yield greater long-term benefits.
Curious about how Garvescope can help you make smarter decisions through Business Intelligence for SMBs, startups, and enterprises? Learn more >>
Everything Feels Urgent at Work: Table of Contents
Why Everything Feels Urgent at Work
The core of this issue is a mismatch between perceived urgency and actual importance.
When everything feels urgent at work, perceived urgency hijacks attention
Tasks with near deadlines, visible label tags (like “urgent!” in emails), and short turnaround times tend to dominate our focus because they activate the brain’s attentional systems. Even when you intellectually know that a task isn’t that important, the immediacy of its timing creates a psychological pull that is hard to resist.
This aligns with findings from decision science: people often choose to complete urgent but less important tasks because urgency itself carries a psychological appeal, offering rapid, certain payoff (e.g., checking something off the list) over long-term importance, which may be more abstract and harder to evaluate.
The difference between urgency and importance
A classic framework for understanding this dynamic is the Eisenhower Matrix, which suggests there are four quadrants of work:
- Urgent and important
- Important but not urgent
- Urgent but not important
- Neither urgent nor important
In practice, many founders find themselves spending most of their time in the “urgent but not important” quadrant because those tasks feel urgent. By contrast, high-impact strategic work often lives in the “important but not urgent” quadrant, exactly where growth and leverage emerge but which often feels less pressing by comparison.
What This Feeling of Urgency Is
Everything feels urgent when your attention is constantly drawn to the short horizon: notifications, deadlines, messages, interruptions. Work becomes a series of reactive engagements rather than a set of intentional progress points.
Someone who regularly jumps from one task to the next isn’t necessarily busy in a productive sense as much they are responding to stimuli. This is consistent with how behavioral economics describes scarcity mindset, where perceived lack of time (or bandwidth) causes the mind to tunnel and focusing on immediate demands at the expense of larger goals.
When everything feels urgent at work, it isn’t a moral failing or a lack of discipline
Don’t look at the sense that everything is urgent as weakness or laziness. It’s often a structural problem: reflections of organizational design, cognitive biases, and cultural reinforcement that promote reactivity over reflection.
Leaders in urgency-driven cultures (whether self-imposed or organizationally reinforced) report declines in thoughtful decision-making and strategic output because they are pulled into constant short-term responses.
The Cost of Perceived Urgency
Feeling like everything is urgent has concrete effects:
| Affect | Reason |
|---|---|
| Burnout and exhaustion | Constant reactivity depletes mental energy and narrows your cognitive bandwidth. |
| Shallow decision-making | Rapid action replaces thoughtful analysis. |
| Stalled long-term progress | Strategic projects get deferred because they don’t have short deadlines attached. |
| Quality erosion | Quick responses increase the likelihood of errors and rework. |
Reframing Urgency When Everything Feels Stressful at Work
The first step in addressing the feeling that everything is urgent is to recognize urgency as a signal but not an end-all, be-all determination of whether or not it needs immediate attention.
Instead of asking:
“Is this urgent?”
Ask:
“Is this important?”
A lookout on the the Titanic spots an iceberg and relays a message to the captain to try to turn the ship.
Important? Yes. Urgent? Yes.
A vendor looking to sell you on a service offering sends you an email saying your website has significant issues.
Important? Yes. Urgent? No.
This reframing pushes work out of reactive mode and into strategic mode. Tools like the Eisenhower Matrix help disentangle perceived urgency from strategic importance.
Why is the vendor’s email less of a priority? For a number of reasons:
- If you accept the vendor’s offer, the SEO impact of making a change could take months regardless of how quickly you take action on the insights
- The vendor wants something from you. Even if they can deliver value, it doesn’t mean there aren’t better options if you vet additional vendors and get a second opinion from an expert.
- You have an opportunity to take an unemotional look at the benefits of spending time on this versus other activities that may create more impactful results. If your website is your only driver of business, then working on it is a valid use of your time. If walk-ins, advertisements, or some other channel are much more effective, then optimize those with your time and worry less about your website.
Another useful insight comes from task prioritization research: individuals are inherently better at responding to immediate demands than prioritizing long-term impact. Understanding this bias helps you observe it without being controlled by it.
Practical Steps to Reduce False Urgency at Work
Establishing scheduled decision points (daily, weekly, quarterly) creates a predictable cadence for addressing real priorities and deprioritizing noise.
When evaluating tasks, add a simple impact score alongside urgency. This can reveal patterns where low-impact tasks are consuming high amounts of attention.
Deliberate time blocks for deep, strategic work guard against the allure of any task that screams “now.”
Teams that don’t agree on what urgent means will default to whatever feels pressing. Establish clarity around criteria for urgency versus importance.
Putting This Into Practice When Everything Feels Urgent At Work
Feeling like everything is urgent is a signal that your system is reacting to short windows instead of strategic direction. Reframing urgency as a symptom of structural design allows you to:
- See urgency as one characteristic among many
- Collectively define what truly matters
- Build rhythms that reinforce direction over distraction
Sources
- Zhu et al., The Mere Urgency Effect, Journal of Consumer Research (2018).
- Research on urgency vs. importance shows people favor urgency even at long-term cost.
- Eisenhower Matrix and urgent vs important frameworks in time management research.
- Analysis of urgency culture’s impact on decision-making and creativity.
- Busy work and the illusion of productivity explained in organizational context.
Leave a Reply