Urgency feels productive: fast, responsive, essential. A never ending list of emails, texts, meetings, and deadlines. Importance feels optional: spare moments of genuine connection, reflection, and long-term thinking. 

The tyranny of the urgent always wins. Importance rarely interrupts. We have to choose it.

Urgency as our autopilot costs us our ability to respond rather than react. We move without thinking about long-term goals or implications. Urgency crowds out the important, flattening relationships, narrowing our focus, and robbing us of clarity. 

As Eisenhower observed, what is urgent is seldom important, but what is important is seldom urgent. Urgency is a manufactured reality that we wear as a badge of honor to feel important, appear productive, or avoid the discomfort of stillness. But, in the words of Adam Grant and many others, “being busy is not the same as being productive.” And as we have shared in recent posts, discomfort is something to approach, not avoid.

Prioritizing the Important

Every individual and team is vulnerable to the tyranny of the urgent. So how do we, collectively and individually, prioritize the important? 

Prioritizing the important does not mean ignoring the urgent. It means creating and protecting time and space for what matters most. To us, it means slowing down, stepping back, and realigning with purpose and perspective. What am I doing? Who is this for? Why must this be done right now? What else can I be doing? 

In this pause, we also find the opportunity to reflect on where we are and how far we’ve come; to show appreciation and gratitude for ourselves, others, and the work we have done so far. We choose importance.