The Plight of False Urgency
Putting a rush order on non-priorities is slowly killing your team
I’m sure you’ve heard some version of this before:
When everything is important, nothing is.
Replace “important” with “urgent” or “P1” or whatever you need to make the pain sting harder for you in your particular line of work.
We’ve all been there before. Commandments are sent down from on high declaring that all tasks need to be done ASAP, with the highest level of urgency. Meanwhile, employees let out a sigh and proclaim that leadership must be living within some fantastical sci-fi HBO series where parallel worlds means more work can get done with the magic of simultaneity.
Quite the dystopia.
These leaders have the best of intentions, you know. They see that each set of work can elevate or save the business in different ways, which means they can all “move the needle” (however slightly), which means they’re all needed.
Of course, they’re wrong. It’s easy to see, with an eagle’s eye view, that clearly you can’t do everything everywhere all at once.
But it’s a lot harder to see such futility when you’re deep in the mess, getting slammed from all sides, wanting nothing but a quick breather. You can understand…
