What Certain Sense of Urgency Says About You
Healthy Procrastination and prioritizing are key to preserving our energy when overwhelmed with tasks — physical and otherwise
Having a sense of urgency is a beautiful thing. It means you have the ability to differentiate important from unimportant things, needful from frivolous things and tackle what needs to be tackled. It means you can prioritize.
Setting priorities is a good trait to inculcate as it boosts our productivity in many cadres of our life. It helps us become more organized, decisive, and executive.
On the other hand, the baleful aspect of a great sense of urgency exists. This explains in situations where we overload ourselves with lists of things to do and force ourselves to complete them all at once over a stipulated period of time.
You guessed right. This is no longer productivity but a total burn out syndrome arising from tackling multiple urgent tasks at once with little or no break. Synonymous to busyness, except we have good intentions to “clear our desks”
The sheer intent to always handle everything that comes our way could be a factor of perfectionism over productivity
Perfectionism is when you attempt to leave everything on a clean note. You have a must-do mentality for the wrong purpose — in tackling all you have to.
Tasks such as sorting out every challenge, searching for and trying to squash every hidden misunderstanding you’ve had with others, repairing every broken stuff, having a therapist on standby for every traumatic event we may experience, replacing every faulty belongings. Notice the invariability in pursuing these things.
It is not to say we shouldn’t engage in most of them but trying to accomplish all of everything we slate no longer means prioritizing — as urgent as they may seem. The sense of urgency in some of the activities you carry out each day lies mostly with the time frame you’ve slated for them. Likewise, the subsequent ones for each week, month, and year.
Mental disorder could also be a role-playing factor to an unhealthy sense of urgency
Suffering from anxiety could lead us to do things we’re meant to lay off for later immediately. It is the brain in panic mode trying to convince us that the worst might happen if we didn’t do the things we planned on doing. The pandemic didn’t help matters as well as it has thrown majority of people in frenzy. There’s now constant fight or flight urge to panic buy, panic eat, panic sleep, panic work and earn all the money as though that’s even possible.
There are hobbies and there are priorities
To eradicate this false sense of urgency require us to sit down and highlight first, what we consider important from the not so important ones followed by sieving the ones that need immediate attention from those that can be done later and ultimately setting our priorities based on this system. Because not everything that needs to be done needs to be carried out at a set time. Not all important stuff needs to be sorted immediately. We learn to organize our thoughts, be mindful of not getting carried away with our daily activities to not remember we are always in charge of doing them and not the other way round.
Our ability to tackle some things and leave others at bay is a great one sometimes. Healthy procrastination will aid you to sort out one thing at a time with the intent to preserve your energy for other equally important energy generating or soul-uplifting tasks — that will ultimately nudge you towards the pending ones.
Prioritizing, on the other hand, enables you to carefully select what and what, to tackle head-on. It is from these sieving tactics, you implore healthy procrastination in execution.
This is surmising in a way that you can have a sporadic mess everywhere that is neatly arranged awaiting tackling (see the image above). Which is far better than over-utilizing your resource on activities that are either depleting or plain frivolous.
The soft blend of healthy procrastination and setting your priorities right will tackle this over-sense of urgency. Thus, preserving your energy and making you more productive instead.
