Sense of urgency
You know that feeling when you come across something on the Internet and it immediately resonates with you and you think of 100 different applications for it? Well, I had that feeling after reading one of Seth Godin’s blog post. He talks about the sense of urgency. Sense of urgency refers to an internally-derived sense of direction, motivation and compulsion to move or act in some way. It involves a relentless focus on doing only those things that move you forward towards your goal. For example, you think about an idea or upcoming project and concludes “I’ll get to that someday,” you are lacking a sense of urgency.
On the contrary, if you see achievers, regardless of what they aim to achieve, whether, in sport, business or otherwise, those who set themselves apart from the rest maintain a sense of urgency in order to be the best they can be. They choose not to disconnect from what they are aiming to achieve, and they pursue it — regardless of what anyone else thinks or says — because their sense of urgency is an integral part of who they are. Sense of urgency means, being aware of what you do and taking the responsibility.
To me, working with a sense of urgency means three things:
- Work with intention and purpose
- Understand the importance of the work you are doing
- Prioritize and know when to say ‘no’
“Sense of urgency” is a good thing. Yet many of us confuse this with a “sense of emergency,” which insidiously saps the progress. Urgency comes from a greater purpose-focused outward, to make good things happen while handling emergencies is a reactionary inward approach to saving ourselves from the daily crisis. In sense of emergency where you put a lot of activity without productive results and it drives us into a state of psychophysiological distress, and if we experience this on a chronic basis, our health will suffer. It has a frantic aspect to it with people driven by anxiety and fear.
And it’s also important to find the difference between ‘have to’ and ‘get to’. Deadlines work. They work because they focus the mind and create urgency. They work to get us to file our taxes or finish an assignment. They’re an external lever for the work we have to do. On the other hand, dessert works too. You don’t need an external force to encourage you to eat dessert after you’ve finished all your vegetables. It’s something you get to do, not something you have to do. You can build a work-life around deadlines. You can procrastinate, pay the late fines and push through the last-minute emergencies because you need all of that in order to get to ‘have to’ mode. Or, you can follow the path of the like most productive and happy people. By redefining the work you’ve chosen to do as something you get to do.
So, it’s really important to not fall in a false sense of urgency. If you want to create a true urgency then look at your calendars. What’s on there that doesn’t move us forward? Get rid of it!’ and leave white spaces on the calendars for the important stuff. And “keeping up urgency is a challenge because you must create it over and over.”
