Why Managers Should Stop Using the Word ‘Urgent’ for Every Prioritized Task
Hint: Because it’s not
True story I had a while back: My group lead sent me a task in a Slack message, followed by “It’s a bit urgent”. Nothing was special about that message or that task, but I got it at the perfect timing — exactly while handling another task defined as “urgent” by my team lead. I remember thinking: “What’s more urgent? ‘a bit urgent’ of a group lead or an ‘urgent’ of a team lead? And how come so many tasks are urgent?”
What’s wrong with urgent?
“calling for immediate attention” — Merriam-Webster
“compelling or requiring immediate action or attention” — Dictionary.com
“very important and needing attention immediately” — Cambridge Dictionary
“very important and needing immediate attention” — The Britannica Dictionary “that needs to be dealt with or happen immediately” — Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries
Each dictionary has a different definition of ‘urgent’, but most definitions I’ve seen have the word immediate (or its adverb form) in it. When you need to do something immediately, you have every excuse to be sloppy;
“I haven’t tested the code because I’ll do that after deploying”, “Can you quickly approve this PR? There’s no need to read it”, and “I’ll just deploy to all production pods at once. No need for gradual scale-up” are only some possible symptoms of the “it’s urgent” justification. When you try to do something too fast — there is a pretty good chance you’ll do it wrong. Too many urgent tasks are a recipe for bad code and bugs in production.
But some tasks ARE urgent!
Some kinds of tasks can be urgent, like reverting a buggy version, restoring a mistakenly-dropped database table, adding resources for your deployments, or even fixing a slide for an important presentation. But none of those cases require code development. Developing something new should never be done in a rush, at least not for companies with stable products and paying customers.
So this entire blog post is about semantics?
No, it's about a lot more than that. This blog post is about perception. When you use the term ‘urgent’ you are setting certain expectations: It needs to be attended to immediately, and it needs to be completed as soon as possible. When my PagerDuty is alerting I handle it instantly, regardless of my current state: Working on something else, attending a meeting, eating lunch, or sleeping. A desire to have a new feature in production by the end of the week is not a good enough reason for me to hit the brakes and switch mode. That “feature” of mine consumes a significant amount of stamina and should be kept as a last resort for truly worthy cases.
Using the term “prioritized”, or even “top-prioritized” to describe a given task can convey the importance of it and the fact it should be handled first, without adding the stress and energy-wasting state mentioned above. You could also specify a target deadline (external or self-assessed) to assure your employee understands the expected timeframe.
Summary
Using the term “urgent” to describe tasks is risky, and should be done carefully. Creating a panic-inducing and stressful work environment is dangerous and harmful for the organization. Anyone who values employee satisfaction (and retention) should differentiate between priority and urgency.
