Tyranny of the Urgent!

Perhaps you have heard the saying: If you need something important to be done, give it to the busiest person and they will get it done! There is a lot of truth in it.

Have you ever wished for a thirty-hour day? Surely this extra time would relieve the tremendous pressure under which we live. Our lives leave a trail of unfinished tasks. Unanswered letters, unvisited friends, unwritten articles, and unread books haunt quiet moments when we stop to evaluate. We desperately need relief.

But would a thirty-hour day really solve the problem? Wouldn’t we soon be just as frustrated as we are now with our twenty-four hour allotment? A mother’s work is never finished, and neither is that of any manager, student, teacher, clergy, counselor, or anyone else we know. Nor will the passage of time help us catch up. Children grow in number and age to require more of our time. Greater experience brings more exacting assignments. So we find ourselves working more and enjoying it less.

When we stop to evaluate, we realize that our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities. Hard work does not hurt us. We all know what it is to go full speed for long hours, totally involved in an important task. The resulting weariness is matched by a sense of achievement and joy. Not hard work, but doubt and misgiving produce anxiety as we review a month or year and become oppressed by the pile of unfinished tasks. We sense demands have driven us onto the reef of frustration. We confess, quite apart from our sins, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

Several years ago an experienced manager said to me, “Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.” He didn’t realize how hard his maxim hit. It often returns to haunt and rebuke me by raising the critical problem of priorities.

We live in constant tension between the urgent and the important. The problem is that the important task rarely must be done today, or even this week. The urgent task calls for instant action – endless demands pressure every hour and day.

A person’s home is no longer a castle; it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because the cellphone, home telephone, and the computer breach the walls with imperious demands. The momentary appeal of these tasks seems irresistible and important, and they devour our energy. But in the light of time’s perspective their deceptive prominence fades; with a sense of loss we recall the important tasks pushed aside. We realize we’ve become slaves to the “tyranny of the urgent.”


( Concepts from the books Tyranny of the Urgent and Freedom from Tyranny of the Urgent by Dr. Charles E. Hummel.)