Urgent!

Strategies to Control Urgency, Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity

Dermot Crowley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780730384656
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730384670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Leverage the power of urgency to avoid burnout and increase performance

Urgency—that frantic feeling that we need to be doing more, and faster—is a destructive force in today's workplace. Unnecessary urgency can be toxic, causing stress and burnout. But not all urgency is bad, and sometimes we really do need to get things done quickly. Too little urgency can lead to inaction and lost productivity. So how do we find the right balance where we can use urgency as a meaningful tool to keep productivity up, without generating burnout? Urgent! is a guide to using urgency for good to help achieve your goals, to drive success, and minimise stress for yourself, your teams, and your business.

This book will teach you to moderate urgency for yourself and those you lead. In our age of fast-paced technology, it's easy to swing between extremes, working reactively one minute, and being inactive the next. The middle ground, described in this book, allows us to work in the "Active Zone" where we maximise proactivity and productivity. By following the practical strategies outlined in this book, readers will learn to understand urgency, become proactive rather than reactive, and lead teams to their fullest potential.

• Eliminate stress and burnout for yourself, your teams, and your businesses

• Learn how to dial urgency up or down, depending on the situation

• Keep teams working in the optimal productive zone by moderating urgency 

• Stay focused on what's important and learn prioritisation skills to avoid burnout

If you feel that you and your team are caught up in busy work, stressed to the max by competing demands, leaving no room to focus on what really matters, Urgent! will show you a new way of thinking, leading, and responding. Learn the skills to reduce overload, get more done, and achieve better performance each day.

 

PART I
Understanding Urgency

Most workplaces are driven by urgency and, unfortunately, it is often unnecessary, unproductive urgency at play. It is an urgency that increases activity levels and stress levels, but does not necessarily increase results. And this urgency can be so prevalent that we no longer see it or recognise it when it takes over.

Think about the emails you receive with URGENT¹⁰ boldly typed in the subject line that are not urgent at all. Or the meetings that get called at a moment’s notice to discuss things that really could have waited. Or even an interruption from a colleague just because they caught your eye when you were on your way to a meeting.

Urgency mainly arises from personal workstyles, behaviours and expectations, not from the type of industry or organisation you work within. If you look close enough you will begin to notice the signs of unnecessary urgency all around you.

But don’t get me wrong. Urgency is not inherently a bad thing and, in fact, many leaders and managers would say that a sense of urgency is critical to create traction and momentum with important projects in their organisations. This is what I call productive urgency.

However, much of what we call ‘urgent’ is harmful to our productivity and our wellbeing. Many urgent things are unnecessarily urgent or are not even pressing at all — they are masquerading as urgent and creating stress and distracting us from more important work. This is what I call unproductive urgency.

At the individual level we create this when we procrastinate, fail to plan properly and adopt reactive workstyles. At the team level unproductive urgency is created when managers don’t protect their team by negotiating and pushing back on urgency. And at the organisational level unproductive urgency is created when leaders permit a culture of urgency to exist. Or worse, when leaders drive a culture of urgency!

Sometimes, rather than creating a sense of urgency we are creating senseless urgency.

Over the years I have worked with many organisations where urgency and reactivity are the norm. As a trainer and a consultant, I get to peek behind the curtain and see what is really happening. Many of the people in these organisations don’t see the problem — they are too close to it. They are living it. But as an outsider I can tell when there is a reactive culture, and I can see the behaviours that lead to people working in the reactive zone for too long. And I desperately want to help, because I passionately believe that we don’t have to work in a constant state of urgency and reactivity. I believe that if we slowed down a bit, we would actually get more work done, and better quality work at that.

Urgency is a very necessary tool to getting things done, but must be used with the following in mind. It must be:

• used purposefully
• used sparingly
• moderated so that it stays within acceptable limits.

Yet most of us have come to expect urgency as the normal rough and tumble of business, and we become victims of it. We feel powerless to change it, and just accept urgent requests, meetings and email responses as a part of our day. We fall into the trap of thinking that urgency is just the way it is. But if we give in to urgency, we pay a real cost.

As we will explore further on, chronic and acute urgency causes unnecessary stress, friction and burnout. It also gets in the way of the important work that might not be urgent, but can provide huge value if we can make time for it. Worst of all, unfettered urgency shapes the culture of an organisation, creating toxic environments that sap morale and wellbeing.

Remember, industries are not reactive by nature. Organisations are not reactive by nature. It is individuals who cause reactivity and urgency most of the time.

Reactivity is a choice we make when faced with urgency. An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• A note from the author
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding Urgency
• Part II: Minimise Personal Reactivity
• Part III: Managing Team Urgency
• Next steps
• Index
• End User License Agreement