"...pressures always favor what goes on inside [the organization over the reality that exists outside of it], what has happened over the future, the crisis over the opportunity, the immediate and visible over the real, and the urgent over the relevant." — Peter Drucker

That's a real twinkle from Mr. Drucker.

I saw the most important Netflix show of my life yesterday. This show was going to give me every answer I needed. I had the urge to start taking notes. The characters were actually onto something.

Turns out it was neither important nor urgent. But it did distract me from replying after hours to a late afternoon Slack. I missed it when my childcare ended promptly at 5 pm. That was actually urgent. Mostly. Someone was feeling a bit lost and needed some guidance. And guidance is best delivered with urgency—not because it’s urgent, but because it feels urgent to the person feeling lost. It’s a mirroring thing.

It did get me thinking. Very few things are actually urgent—like the world will end, you'll lose thousands of dollars, P1 wake-me-up-pager-duty-now urgent.

Most of the time something feels urgent either because:

• Someone is doing a great job telling a story and the characters feel urgency (my TV program I’ve since erased from my memory), or
• Someone real feels like it’s urgent and shares that feeling with you.

This is the phenomenon I've heard someone call Urgency Transfer—the tendency to absorb other people’s time-critical emotional energy as if it were our own deadline. Sometimes those other people are just talking on TV!

To the Belly of the Beast (Biases)

Let’s gander at the Eisenhower Matrix:

<missing image of the matrix you can lookup on google>

When Monday morning arrives, someone Slacks you with “Can you jump on a quick call?” and suddenly you’re living in the quadrant labeled: "Someone said this was urgent"

It happens instantly, invisibly. You see someone sweating, and your brain decides that if they’re sweating, you should probably be sweating too. In a reasonably modern company, where everyone is slacking mostly useless things, with slack notifications flying, we transfer emotions pretty quickly too.

As usual, it's from some of our lovely internal biases:

1. A Need to Resolve Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)

FUD is wonderfully uncomfortable—it's living in ambiguity. The easiest path is to hand it off to someone else or just start working and hope it goes away. If you successfully give it away, then everyone else is panicking instead. Individual anxiety gets transformed into organizational anxiety. We're in this one together.

2. Reciprocation Pressure

When someone helped you last week, you know you owe them. And we want our teammates to succeed.

This means we sometimes jump into the wrong boat when they have issues, rather than asking: "Should we be in the boat at all? Is this issue actually urgent?" Maybe the other boat is actually sinking and you should stay put. Or invite them into your sturdy not sinking boat.

3. Assumed Responsibility

When somebody asks you a question, hearing their question tricks your brain into believing you are responsible for the answer. Subtle.

It’s a cognitive illusion. It's like a leading question from a lawyer. Sometimes you have to start by not answering the question. Also be careful with lawyers.

Manager Panic Laundering

A VP hears something alarming on a customer call. They immediately ask the director "How could this happen?".
The director Slacks the team lead with high alert emojis.
The team lead drops everything to dig in.

The lead spends 20 minutes and then pulls in her left and right hand folks. They spend the afternoon debugging and realize—right before logging off—that this was an intended change made by another team to the user experience... poorly communicated across teams (and customer communications also not so good).

• The VP felt FUD and wanted to resolve it ASAP.
• The Director and Team Lead took on resolving it without understanding who should take responsibility.
• The go-to folks jumped on the grenade because they saw their lead struggling.

What a massive waste of time.

Some Circuit Breakers

To prevent Urgency Transfer, teams need an equivalent of an circuit breaker. Something that interrupts the flow just long enough for analysis.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Ask “why”

A simple team rule:

Know why you are doing something.

If you don’t know why something made it through four layers of management. Ask. If your manager doesn’t know, make sure they push the question back up.

In a healthy organization this is not painful, but expected. Yeah. WhyTF did someone ask you to do this random task. Everyone should know.

2. Ask “what if it's an XXL”

When someone shares an urgent request, ask:

“Before I dive in, what happens if this takes a day? How soon is this needed?”

If the answer is “Oh… we can figure something out until tomorrow,” congratulations—this urgency may not be red-hot.

If the answer is “The CEO is actually waiting on this,” share your estimate and explore how to provide something useful in a reasonable time.

It’s common for management to have the wrong mental model of how things actually get done. Someone might think a text change takes 5 minutes, without knowing there are translation strings or an arcane home-built CMS in the way.

3. You can't do everything

Ask: “I can start on this now, but here’s what may get delayed if I do. Is that tradeoff okay?”

This reframes the situation from: “Am I being helpful?” to “Is this actually worth the opportunity cost?”

You may kick off a larger conversation—but if it truly isn’t urgent, spending a little time weighing the balance is the right path. If it is a drop-everything task, you’ll know quickly.

Sometimes tho you gotta dig in. Don’t pretend nothing is urgent. Just that most things aren't.

I am a strong believer that the day to day in companies should be boring. Processes should fade into the background. The interesting aspects of a business should be where people spend their time and energy — not answering non-urgent emails urgently.

To quote Drucker again:

“A well-managed organization is a ‘dull’ organization. The ‘dramatic’ things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday.”