Much Ado About Urgency 🚨

Abby here! It takes a village to care for a newborn, a two-year-old, and somehow still show up to work dressed and on time! So I've enlisted some help in the form Dio's and my parents. As grateful as we are for the help, the trade-off is we now receive approximately 147 urgent texts a day about Henry. "Is it normal if he wakes up 10 minutes early from his nap?" "He only finished half his bottle. Should I call the doctor?" "I can't find his swaddle anywhere — how will he ever sleep again!?"

As it turns out, none of these matters are urgent. So, I've been leaving my family on read, and I suggest you do the same! (No one tell my mother I said that.) 

There are lots of reasons people make bad decisions – hubris, bad information, hangriness (hanger?), Costco prices, frozen margaritas…I could go on. When it comes to bad real estate decisions, time pressure is at the top of the list of common culprits.

And what makes time pressure particularly tricky — so much so that people to sell their BLTS down the river — is that it’s not real. It’s just a convincing illusion.

How do I know this? I see it play out in my inbox all the time.  

Here’s the setup:
We're in LOI or lease negotiations, and we’ve been waiting — sometimes for weeks — on the landlord to answer one question that will allow us to make a decision about how we want to proceed. The blessed email finally arrives, and one of the eight people on the thread responds right away. Then another. Then another.

Week after week we’d been stalled, just waiting. The poor retailer has taken up knitting and/or chain-smoking. Then all of the sudden, someone emails the group, and it’s all aboard! The wheels are starting to turn faster and faster. Before we know it, we’re on a runaway train moving at 100 miles a minute. Keep up or get left behind!

❗️It’s in this flurry of momentum where retailers conflate urgency and importance. 

If you’ve ever attended a productivity workshop, you may be familiar with the concept of The Tyranny of the Urgent. In short, it’s the idea that the most urgent tasks get attended to the fastest, but they may not be the most important. A totally random example (that definitely didn’t happen to me) is when the lawn always gets mowed, but the overloaded gutter has to fall off the side of the house to get any attention. Out of sight, out of mind.

🌀 Urgency, or the perception of it, messes with our heads outside of the productivity sphere too. The rapid-fire ding ding ding of emails on a topic (that really is very important) can make it seem like it is also very time-sensitive – as if the opportunity will slip away if you don’t respond rightthissecond. 

👀 The trick is to recognize the illusion.

A deal you’ve been working on for six months is not suddenly in danger if you don’t respond in the next six minutes, so don’t drop everything and respond like it is. Seriously, you can undo months of careful work by letting cortisol and impatience drive. Rapid-fire emails about something super important like your lease can be very hard to leave on read, but that’s exactly what you should do. 

My advice to you when the runaway email train starts gaining momentum on something high stakes is this: do not to run alongside it and try to jump on. You should pause and take a beat. If it helps slow your heart rate, send a short response confirming receipt and saying you’ll be in touch. Then step away and figure out what you actually need to know in order to respond. 

Remember, that train literally can’t leave you behind, so as fast as it seems to be moving, it’s not going anywhere without you on it. Don’t be afraid that you’ll be abandoned in a field somewhere with no cell service. 🌾