While reading Carmon Friedrich’s weblog the other day I ran across the phrase “tyranny of the urgent.” It’s a phrase originated by Charles Hummel years ago, in a short booklet of the same name. Hummel’s observation is simple enough. People tend to set their priorities based on the urgency of a task—how quickly the task must be attended to—rather than the importance of a task—how much benefit will result from completing the task. Of all the urgent tasks on our list, many of them are not important, and of all the important tasks, many of them are not urgent. Consequently our time ends up consumed by urgent but unimportant tasks (e.g. getting to the dry cleaners by 6pm), while important tasks that aren’t urgent are neglected (e.g. reading aloud to our children).
The solution is also straightforward enough, though not quite as obvious: don’t permit tasks to become urgent. Sometimes this is as simple as rethinking priorities—just because you intended to get to the dry cleaners by 6pm doesn’t mean it was critical to do so. And sometimes urgency can be reduced by renegotiating your commitments—you may have promised to deliver an item sooner than the recipient actually needs it, and the recipient may be happy to reschedule. But more often urgency can only be avoided by making careful plans in the beginning and being diligent about following them, i.e. by becoming dependable.
Much of my twenty years in corporate America was spent planning and executing projects that were very carefully timed. We would take a project, break it down into many small tasks, figure out how long each task would take to complete, determine which tasks had to be completed before a particular task could be started, and then sequence the tasks so that the project would be done in the shortest possible time. This meant lots and lots of deadlines, all of them sacred because missing one of them could make the entire project late—once you had committed to a deadline, the person waiting on your work depended on you to meet it so that he could proceed in a dependable manner to meet his own deadlines.
Corporate planning emphasizes dependability for the sake of efficiency, which is one very good way to maximize output. Time saved on one task allows us to start the next task sooner, and so more tasks are completed in a given period. Efficiency is such an important concern in industrial society that it sometimes mistaken for a good thing, an end in itself. We look for gizmos that will help us complete a job in half the time, not stopping to ask whether we have any use for the other half, or whether we may end up robbing ourselves of half the pleasure.
We teach our children to be dependable, but not for the sake of efficiency. We teach them that dependability is a matter of being considerate of others. To the extent that we are undependable, we become a burden to others who make their own plans based on our promises. If someone fails to keep the laundry going, the whole family is burdened by having to do laundry into the night. If the table isn’t set on time, everyone who comes to the table on time must wait before they can eat. If the bread isn’t baked, the family goes without bread that day. If someone’s schoolwork isn’t done on time, the rest of the family misses out on a family activity while the work is completed.
There’s no secret to becoming dependable; it takes diligence, and a commitment to be considerate of others. But we offer a few guidelines: do the tedious stuff before the enjoyable stuff; clear the small stuff off the list quickly; stay far ahead of your deadlines; check and re-check your to-do list; in idle moments, ask yourself (or your parents) if there is anything you should be doing.
Almost all our children’s work is done within the context of the family, so dependability is learned under necessarily unrealistic conditions. We teach them to take satisfaction in performing tasks promptly and well. We give them reasonable plans to execute, and we help them make reasonable plans of their own. We help them stay on track while they execute a plan. We often alleviate the consequences when they mess up. And we do our best to model dependability ourselves. To the extent that these efforts succeed, urgency disappears.
If you are suffering from urgency, it is the result of poor planning somewhere along the line, maybe your own but quite possibly someone else’s. In cubicles around the country you will see a sign posted that says this:
Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Rude, yes, but it states a hard truth. Sometimes urgency is unavoidable, and the generous and gracious thing to do is to pitch in above and beyond what you originally promised. But more often urgency is created by people who fail to plan precisely because they expect others to pitch in to fix the emergencies they create. Some folks can’t be bothered to think ahead. Others thrive on a crisis atmosphere, deriving a sense of importance from frantic activity.
When dealing with such undependable people, do yourself and them a favor: be clear in your own commitments, and stick to them. If you said you’d need two weeks to complete a job, make sympathetic noises when they come to you saying they need the job done right away—but remind them that it’ll still take two weeks.
