When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is Important

In an always-on world made busier by the demands of AI adoption, taking time to focus on what’s important is constantly crowded out by what’s urgent. It might seem impossible to fit in, but an hour or two in your week to properly reflect and focus can really propel you forward in ways that constant rushing never will – and it’s worth every individual and leader considering before the rush for year-end takes hold.  Martina Doherty discusses.

US president Dwight Eisenhower once said that what is important is rarely urgent, and what is urgent is rarely important. Stephen Covey later turned that insight into the framework that many of us have seen but few actually use – but it’s one that came to mind recently during a coaching session with a senior leader. 

He mentioned that there is a fundamental capability gap in his wider organisation – manifesting in different ways which he and his team have raised multiple times. But because the issue is not yet causing any significant problems or negatively impacting P&L it isn’t being dealt with at a more strategic level.

Left alone, it will eventually cause an urgent problem that will have to be dealt with, but my client was reluctant to continue to keep pushing it.  Why? Because raising it would mean weeks of meetings: aligning stakeholders, unpicking the root cause, agreeing on a way forward – and he just doesn’t have the time. He is, in his words, “too busy running the business to fix the business.”

This is absolutely not a criticism of him. It’s the honest reality of what happens when urgency in a workload crowds out importance. It’s also a great snapshot of what has become the norm in all our working lives – too busy dealing with the urgent to give proper space for the important.

The busiest we’ve ever been – and getting busier

To-do lists and work schedules are overwhelming: client demands, performance pressure, volatile markets, the daily churn of business as usual. Layer AI on top of all that and the pressure on our time only grows. Not AI doing the work for us – but the work that AI creates: evaluating tools, running pilots, figuring out where it fits, worrying about where it doesn’t. Ironically, the technology being sold to us as a time-saver is, for many leaders right now, a huge consumer of time. 

The casualty in all of this is thinking time – genuine, undistracted space to consider what really matters and to spot opportunities for how the business and job roles could look over the next one, three or five years. 

In my last article I wrote about how Swedish furniture company IKEA retrained 8,500 employees who had been freed up as a result of an AI chatbot handling routine customer queries. They were upskilled to become interior design consultants, generating a whole new revenue stream for the business that was significantly more than the initial cost savings gained from deploying the bot. The decision to do this wasn’t made by the IKEA leadership team in a series of meetings squeezed into a jammed schedule. A move of that scale and magnitude needed proper thinking – but in doing so, a whole new profit centre for the business was created.

The important stuff doesn’t need another meeting

The instinct, when a leadership team senses it needs more strategic thinking, is to schedule more meetings. That rarely works. Meetings are built for decisions and updates, not for the kind of reflective, sometimes uncomfortable thinking that important-but-not-urgent issues require. They run to an agenda and end the minute the next one starts.

Genuine thinking time needs a different container – one designed specifically to slow things down rather than move them along. Offsites can be really useful in this respect – but pulling a team of key decision-makers out of the office at the same time can be difficult to organise, and even harder to do on a regular basis. More importantly, the momentum generated on an offsite rarely survives contact with business-as-usual when everyone returns to the office. 

This is where individual or team coaching earns its place. Done well, it creates a regular, protected space where individuals or groups of individuals are asked the harder questions nobody has time to ask in a normal meeting: What are we avoiding? What would we do if this weren’t urgent yet? What will this cost us if we don’t start addressing it?

For my client, that space allowed him to properly name the capability issue he was seeing – not because a deadline forced it.

Urgent is not always important

Back to what Eisenhower said about how important tasks are rarely urgent, and urgent tasks are rarely important. Think of urgent as a crying baby – it needs attention now. Your health on the other hand is important – vital for your existence, but unless there are any obvious issues it generally doesn’t cause concern. If neglected, however, (because of that constantly crying baby), it will slowly erode your quality of life.

In his simple 2×2 grid Stephen Covey sorted tasks by urgency and importance.

• Urgent and important – the crisis zone. Deal with it now.
• Important, not urgent – the growth and strategy zone; where thinking time lives, and what most people let slide.
• Urgent, not important – delegate it.
• Neither urgent nor important – stop doing it.

I am pretty sure that if we took the time to look at this, we all have items in our schedules or to-do lists that fall into each of these zones. However, depending on seniority it’s not always realistic or possible to just stop doing work or delegate it elsewhere. In those instances, if there are tasks on your list that you don’t know if they are important or not, ask your manager where they fit into the bigger picture – and if they don’t, then question why they are on your list at all.

My client’s issue was sitting within that second bullet point – not screaming for attention today, so it keeps losing out to whatever is. But the cost of neglecting it will compound until it eventually becomes a crisis. 

Slowing down to speed up

In an always-on world, made even busier by the demands of an AI transition that nobody has the playbook for, it can feel like everything is urgent – urging us to move faster and achieve more. We tell ourselves (and others) that doing more and clearing our to-do lists will get us to our goals more quickly, but that’s not really the case. 

But there is an unexpected power in slowing down – something we all experience when we come back to work after a holiday. The reality is that pausing gives us the energy and clarity needed for real, lasting progress. And while it may seem counterintuitive in the busy day-to-day of work, slowing down on a regular basis – taking an hour or two in your week to properly reflect and focus – can propel you forward in ways that constant rushing never will.