It was a Tuesday afternoon and I had four things on my laptop that all needed to be done by Friday and two more that had been sent that morning by people who believed they were the most urgent.
This was not an unusual week.
In a brand strategy role at a company the size of Signoraware, urgency is the ambient condition. There is almost always something needed by someone on a timeline that doesn’t account for the other things you’re also doing. The default mode is prioritisation — deciding, continuously, which urgent thing gets addressed first and which urgent thing waits.
What I’ve noticed about these weeks is how important it is to stay calm about what is actually important. Not everything that is called urgent is urgent. Not every deadline is real in the sense that the work genuinely cannot happen after it. Some deadlines are genuine. Some are habits — the way a person has always asked for things, regardless of whether the timeline is actually required.
Getting better at reading the difference has taken time. And it has sometimes required conversations that weren’t comfortable — checking whether a deadline is firm before reorganising everything around it.
The week I’m thinking of resolved the way most of these weeks do. Everything that actually needed to be done got done. Two things got pushed by a day with no real consequence. One thing I thought was urgent turned out to have a different timeline than I’d been told. I finished the week tired but functional, which is most weeks.
What I try to remember during these periods is that the feeling of everything being urgent is not the same as everything actually being urgent. The feeling is real. The situation is usually manageable, even when it doesn’t feel that way on Tuesday afternoon.
The one thing that consistently helps: before touching anything on the list, I spend ten minutes writing down what would genuinely break if it wasn’t done today. That list is always shorter than the original one. I start there.