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How to fight the "urgency bias" (and work towards long-term goals)
Why it’s hard to ignore urgent tasks
A few explanations as to why it’s so hard to reject urgent tasks:
- The completion bias. Our brains crave the reward we get from checking off small to-dos from our list.
- Tunnel vision: When we get overwhelmed by the things we have to do, we choose to act on those most available to us; these are usually emails, calls, meetings, and other low-friction tasks.
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The urgency bias
We usually give priority to unimportant tasks when there is a sense of urgency around them.
We’re actually psychologically wired to put aside important tasks in favor of tasks that feel more urgent. But spending our time taking care of urgent tasks can leave us feeling exhausted and unaccomplished.
Urgency puts us into reactive mode
The problem is that we’re continually bombarded with urgent work: emails, meetings, calls, and instead of being in control of our time and attention, we respond and act on someone else’s priorities.
Deep attention vs. hyper attention
- Deep attention means putting our focus on one task for a long period of time and putting aside other external interruptions.
- Hyper attention is turning our focus swiftly between different tasks, opting for diverse information streams, and looking for a constant high-level of stimulation.
Make the urgency bias work for you
- Break your big projects down into simple manageable steps and then set a short deadline for each.
- Switch from “task urgency” to “time urgency” , to choose what really deserves your attention.
- Don’t let urgent tasks control the first hour of your day. Set aside blocks of time for emails and meetings so they don’t sneak into your focused time.
Urgent tasks will always come up
Instead of allowing them to take over your time, make a plan for how you’ll deal with them.
Begin by defining the tasks that demand 100% of your focus and the ones that can be dealt with while being interrupted. You want to give your most focused hours to your most important tasks.
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Track Your Time
You need to find out just where your time is going currently. You can use a pen and paper, a spreadsheet, or an app to visualize where you spend most of the hours in your day.
Create A Time-Blocking Template
- Block your time for specific types of work, not individual tasks.
- Block your time for core work like coding, designing or writing, for shallow work like daily tasks and maintenance, for meetings and emails, and fill it with frequent breaks to replenish yourself.
- Give yourself space between blocks so that you can decompress and keep your energy levels high.
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Have one daily priority
Many of us start our mornings with dozens of things we need to get done, but later realize that we haven't crossed any of them off our lists. We did get stuff done, but none of the things we pl...
Make planning a habit
Some mornings we feel motivated to create a to-do list, but that is often the exception. We need to get things done, even when we feel disengaged.
Start by setting the alarm for your daily planning session at the same time every day. Tack your new daily planning session onto an existing habit like drinking your morning coffee.
Align your to-do list with goals
- Break down your big goals into daily tasks. You can't add "Get in shape" to your daily to-do list, but you can add "spend 30 minutes on my bike."
- Consider your week as a whole. You likely have multiple goals. Some goals benefit from daily activity, while working towards others a few times a week can create momentum.
- Add your have-to-do tasks last. We often fill our to-do lists with have-to-do tasks that crowd the whole day. Adding it last forces you to fit your have-to-do tasks around your goal tasks.
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The Busyness Paradox: Addicted To Being Busy
- Personal productivity is not about all-round efficiency, and it is wrong to think about your input as that of a machine in a factory unit.
- This is further complicated by our mistaken assumption that being in demand means that we are doing a splendid job.
- We blur our all boundaries between our work and personal life and every minute of the day is to be kept busy as we rush to attend every meeting, cross out every task from the to-do list or to answer every email that we get.
Completion Bias
Our brain starts to favour small tasks that give a false impression of productivity (woohoo! I just sent out fifty emails!) while we neglect the large, complex but meaningful tasks.
This is known as the completion bias.
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