It’s a good idea to demonstrate a certain “sense of urgency” in one’s skills, something sought-after and valued by companies in a world where, as we keep repeating, everything keeps speeding up.
When urgency is counterproductive
This famous sense of urgency, which is in some people’s DNA or an acquired skill for others, doesn’t always manifest itself in the best possible way.
Just as we say that when everything is important, nothing is important, when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. Urgency contains a notion of prioritization in relation to what is not urgent. If everything is urgent, nothing is a priority and we’re back to square one.
For some people, this means that doing things quickly is always better than doing them well. Even if it means doing an imperfect job or making a poor business negotiation, which you always end up paying for one day. Yes, the best is the enemy of the good, but speed shouldn’t be the North Star of work organization.
Finally, when two people work at different speeds, either because one prefers speed or because he or she has superior skills , this can be a source of frustration, inefficiency and even conflict (4 ways of dealing with a person who thinks everything is urgent FR).
And yet everyone knows that nothing is more important than time.
Time: the world’s rarest resource
It has to be said over and over again: nothing is rarer in the world than time. It’s our most precious resource.
You can lose an agent and gain more the next day, you can lose an object and replace it, but lost time is lost forever.
That’s why we need to make the best possible use of it. Does this mean that urgency is everywhere? No, just the opposite.
Don’t confuse speed with urgency
And this is where (almost) everyone makes a big mistake: speed is not urgency.
Speed is the way you optimize your use of time; urgency is the way you prioritize things under time pressure.
We can work fast without there being any urgency, because that’s our nature. Urgency, we think, requires us to move quickly on something with an imposed deadline.
Speed means doing something as well as possible as quickly as possible, while urgency means doing something in the allotted time.
The problem is that urgency often confuses speed with haste.
What’s more, urgency doesn’t always mean speed. I like to work fast and have a sense of urgency, but in an emergency situation, I often slow down. Indeed, urgency tells me to prioritize one thing under time pressure, which eventually means abandoning the rest to concentrate on one thing and doing it well and on time.
Speed is a question of rhythm, urgency is a question of deadlines and therefore of priorities. The two can go together, but that’s not a hard and fast rule, and often, even an emergency situation can call for a break to get a clear head and do things meticulously and with a cool head. Knowing how to move fast can be a great help, but it’s not always necessary.
So when we say “having a sense of urgency”, we should mean “having a sense of priorities”, so as to focus on what matters at any given moment. Unfortunately, some people understand this to mean “going fast at any cost”.
Bottom line
Bottom line
Working fast is one thing, but knowing how to work in urgency is quite another.
Working in a hurry requires, first and foremost, knowing how to prioritize. Knowing how to work fast can be useful, but not always. Above all, you have to do the best you can under time constraints.
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