Urgent or important: why we so often pick the wrong one

Have you ever wrapped up a packed day, with emails handled, little things sorted out and messages sent, only to realize in the evening that the truly important task hasn't moved an inch? It's not necessarily a lack of willpower. Researchers have shown in the lab that urgency grabs our attention, even when it pays off nothing.

The pull of pure urgency

In 2018, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee published a series of five experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research on how we choose between an urgent task and an important one. The principle was simple: offer two tasks of similar difficulty, one with a bigger payoff than the other, and give the less rewarding one a short deadline.

In one of the experiments, the less rewarding task “expired” either in 10 minutes or in 24 hours. When it expired in 24 hours, 13% of students chose it. When it expired in 10 minutes, 31% did, even though it still paid less.

The authors call this the mere urgency effect: we act as if completing a time-pressured task were appealing in itself, regardless of what it actually gets us. Their explanation: a short deadline captures our attention and pulls it away from what matters, namely the consequences of the task.

Two details from the study are especially valuable for you:

• When participants were clearly reminded of what each task paid, the effect shrank.
• People who often feel overwhelmed were more susceptible to it, because they're constantly focused on how much time is left.

An old distinction that still helps

In 1954, in a speech at Northwestern University, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower quoted a former college president: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The line is deliberately exaggerated, but it gave its name to a well-known tool: the Eisenhower matrix, which sorts tasks according to two questions.

• Important and urgent: you deal with it now.
• Important but not urgent: you set aside a specific time for it in your calendar. This is the box that moves your life forward, and it's the one that gets sacrificed most often.
• Urgent but not important: you do it quickly, batch it with other small things, or hand it off to someone else.
• Neither urgent nor important: you can probably cross it off.

Four research-based reflexes

1. Write down what each task gives you. Since the effect weakens when consequences are visible, jot a short phrase next to your main tasks: “gets me closer to my career-change goal,” “avoids a penalty.” When it's time to choose, those words help balance things out against the ticking clock.

2. Give the important stuff a real deadline. An important task with no date stays invisible next to everyone else's emergencies. Give it a date and a time slot, even artificial ones. You're creating a legitimate urgency that serves what matters.

3. Spot the fake emergencies. An offer that “expires tonight,” a red notification badge, a message marked “quick”: all of these play on exactly the mechanism Zhu and colleagues described. Before reacting, ask yourself what would really happen if you waited until tomorrow.

4. Slow down when you feel overwhelmed. That's precisely when you're most susceptible to urgency. Take two minutes to reread your list and consciously choose the next task, instead of following the loudest one.

A five-minute sorting routine

Every morning, or the night before:

1. List everything that comes to mind.
2. For each item, answer yes or no to “is it important?” and then to “is it urgent?”
3. Pick just one important, non-urgent task for the day, and place it in a time slot when you're at your best.
4. Batch the small urgent items into one block, for example late in the morning.
5. Guilt-free, cross off whatever is neither.

The goal isn't to ignore urgent things, since some of them are real. It's to keep room, every day, for what truly matters.

With ForgeMe

In ForgeMe, each task can have a priority and a due date: it's the simplest way to put a date on the important stuff before urgent things fill up your day. For a major project, a goal broken down into sub-goals lets you keep in view why each step matters.