What to Do When Everything is Urgent

I once worked with a woman who quit because our boss kept putting stacks of tasks on her desk, all marked urgent. Each time she tried to clarify what she should do first, the boss just shrugged and said it didn’t matter what came first as long as it all got done. I respect her decision to quit, but we aren’t all able to leave a job when the expectations are unreasonable. Let’s talk about the other options you have when everything is urgent.

How to Triage the Urgent

In urgent medical situations, doctors and nurses triage cases to decide which patient to assist first. Emergency departments have non-urgent, semi-urgent, urgent, emergency, and emergent levels to distinguish among cases based on the patient’s pulse, respiratory rate, bleeding, cognitive state, etc. In situations with constrained resources, they also have to factor in the likelihood of the patient surviving or the availability of resources (e.g., blood) needed to determine who gets helped and in what order.

In your corporate job, you’re probably not making as many life-altering decisions, but your prioritization matters, too. Here are some things to consider

How Fast Will a Bigger Problem Emerge?

When you’re figuring out which urgent task to do first, give greater priority to one that’s going to get worse quickly than to one that’s not such a risk to go south precipitously.

Imagine you learn that the briefing pack that went to the CEO contains incorrect information. Sure, that’s bad. But it’s more urgent if the CEO is currently walking into a meeting with an analyst than if she’ll be prepping for analyst calls tomorrow in a couple of hours.

How Severe Will the Consequences Be?

A sooner problem is one thing; a bigger problem is another. Give greater priority to an urgent task that will lead to material risks or issues if you don’t rectify it quickly.

In our misinformed CEO example, there’s a big difference between the briefing containing a mistake in the number of employees or the name of the new product and an error in the financials (you don’t want the SEC to come calling).

Will We Miss the Window?

One thing we often forget is that urgent doesn’t necessarily mean disaster. It’s possible that the urgent task is about capitalizing on an opportunity. If that’s the case, you’re not measuring the downside; you’re assessing the upside. What’s the opportunity cost if we don’t make this happen?

There are infinite examples of this. Some have obvious timing, like submitting a bid in a competitive RFP process. Others are harder to gauge because you don’t know when the window will close, like if you’re trying to hit the market with a new product before your competitors do.

Who Else Could Help?

Sometimes, your triage isn’t about whether the action gets prioritized or not; it’s whether it becomes your priority. You need to differentiate between activities that only you can do and those that others could do just as well (or at least do a passable job to get past the crisis phase).

If the sh!t is hitting the fan because your cloud computing platform is down, you might be the person who knows the code better than anyone. You skip the crisis communication meeting to find the problem. For those who can’t help in the code, calling key customers or working on restoration plans might be the most urgent priority.

Is it Even Worth It?

The hardest decision in triage must be the decision to leave a patient to die because they are too far gone, and any time or resources you spend trying to save them will mean others suffer. What’s the equivalent in your world? Is there an urgent but futile task that will take too much time and effort that could be better invested elsewhere?

Salespeople sometimes have to make this call. They have a big client who’s clearly dissatisfied and threatening to move to another provider. Do they drop all their other prospects to try to make the save? Or has the client already made up their mind, and they’re just using you for leverage on price with the new vendor? Would the time and energy be better spent winning new clients?

Based on these criteria, you can make a judgment about which of your many urgent tasks is going to get your attention first.

How to Make the Save

When faced with multiple urgent matters, there are two bad options. One is to try to work on them all simultaneously, and the other is to work on one for too long while others become more desperate.

Divide Things Into Chunks

To avoid either of those ditch-to-ditch overcorrections, think about your activities in meaningful chunks. If we continue the Emergency Department metaphor, you might stop the bleeding on one task and then switch to doing the same with another. The second chunk might involve finding the underlying problem and performing surgery to correct it.

It’s silly to think that you must completely rehabilitate and discharge one patient before attending to the next.

It’s ok to move between tasks once you’ve completed a chunk, but not until then.

Focus for Efficiency

One of the main problems when you have many urgent things facing you is that you respond to the rising anxiety by trying to do multiple things at once. Multi-tasking doesn’t work; it reduces efficiency, increases errors, and causes more stress in the process. (The irony is that research suggests one of the leading causes of multi-tasking is the anxiety of so many things to get done, while one of the effects of multitasking is heightened anxiety.) So, instead of getting into the anxiety death spiral, it’s better to become ruthlessly focused on your one urgent priority.

In an Emergency department, they pull a blue curtain around the gurney to section the patient and the team off from the rest of the world. You could try a blue curtain (I would love to see that in an office), but a more metaphorical barrier would probably suffice.

Tap Into the Team

One last thought: urgency can create tunnel vision and blind you to the people around you who could be of assistance. Be sure to lift your head occasionally to communicate where you’re at, share your thought process, and get feedback on your choices. You might find people who are able to pitch in or who have ideas for how to cope more efficiently or effectively.

If you’re facing multiple urgent tasks, don’t try to go it alone.

Facing a torrent of urgent tasks can be stressful. You’ll manage that stress more effectively if you have a clear thought process for triaging your priorities and a focused approach to moving through them efficiently.

Additional Resources

How to Handle Competing Priorities

What to Do When Your Boss Won’t Take No for an Answer

From Kevin Eikenberry Manage “Everything is Urgent” Behavior

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