Episode 54 |Urgent People vs. Urgent Tasks

I was at a workshop recently where the topic of urgency came up. We were talking about how to manage expectations at work. And one thing that really stood out was how often people struggled to tell the difference between an urgent task and an urgent person. So that's what I want to talk about today. How to separate the task from the person so you can make better decisions about what really needs your attention.

Hello, hello and welcome back to the Better Workday podcast. How are you doing? If you're new here, you're very welcome. It is lovely to have you. My name is Niamh Moynihan and every week I'm here to help you have a better workday. So let me ask you this. Have you ever dropped everything to respond to an email or a request just because of who asked rather than thinking about what was actually being asked?

I think it happens to all of us and it's totally understandable, especially when you're dealing with people in senior roles or people who you really want to support. But when we confuse the urgency of the person with the urgency of the task, it can throw us off completely. We're unsure of our priorities, it can overload our workday and it can create unnecessary stress for us and for the people that we work with. And look, I put my hand up.

I have been the urgent person myself, especially earlier in my career. I was in a lot of busy operational roles, which means I had to move fast and I liked to be the person who got things done. But the problem was I didn't always manage other people's expectations or my own. I wouldn't necessarily say something was urgent, but my tone, my energy, the way I approached it and the way I approached the person, it made people feel like they had to drop.

everything. And then often, which I think is the worst part, I'd be too busy with other things to even move their work along once they had prioritised my stuff and finished it for me. And now looking back, I realise how stressful that must have been for them and how unnecessary a lot of that urgency really was.

Later in my career, I'm lucky to have worked with some wonderful managers, one in particular who was really good at managing expectations. He made a point of clearly telling the team when something was urgent and more importantly, when it wasn't. Even when he was busy or in a rush, he'd take a moment to say, this is flexible, get to it when you can, which was brilliant, or I need this by 3pm because I have a meeting at 4pm. Equally helpful. And it made such a difference.

We weren't depending on guessing. There was no unnecessary panic, just clarity.

So here's the first thing I want you to remember. It's important to recognise the difference between who is asking and what is being asked. Just because someone influential or senior asks for something, it doesn't automatically make it urgent.

A good question to pause and ask yourself is if someone else asked me to do this, would it still feel urgent? That quick moment of reflection can save you a lot of stress. And if you're not sure how urgent something really is or what's really involved, you can use clarifying questions to help you understand things better. You can say things like when's the next step due or what's the impact if this is delayed?

Or is there a hard deadline? And I have a list of clarifying questions in a guide, and I'll put the link to that in the show notes for you. And it's really, really handy for situations like this if you're not sure how to ask those questions.

And I want to say if you're leading a team, it's even more important to manage this urgency. So you must be setting clear expectations about how you communicate what's urgent. Eximple things like always including a due date or always explain the why behind the deadline completely change the way that your team operates and again reduces all that unnecessary stress, all that unnecessary rush.

Now, I always say workplaces are full of people running around putting out fires. But sometimes we need to step back and ask who is starting the fires. When I'm working with leaders and managers at different levels, I love asking them to identify who the fire starter is in their team or in their division. And quite often they have to take a moment to put their own hand up. Because quite often, as I've said before, we're the ones creating the urgency.

And so if this sounds like you, if you're the one creating the urgency without even maybe realizing it before now, there are things that you can do. The first thing I always say is look for trends. What's starting the fire? Are there particular times of the quarter, times of the year? Are there particular stakeholders, particular products? Is there any pattern that you can see? And if there's a pattern there, can you take any proactive steps to take the heat out of the fire?

The second thing you can do is to bring in an urgency check before you assign work. And I did this a lot. I just took a pause, took a moment to ask myself, how urgent is this? And then checked how I was communicating that to other people. And then if you are being asked to do a lot and then you're responsible for distributing work in order to deliver the results.

it's really important for you to start bringing some buffers into that process. So, for example, if you're in a middle management role, this is really relevant for you. You might be asked to do something by a more senior person. They sound urgent, so it appears to be urgent. Before you then go and move that urgency or pass that urgency onto your team, pause, take a moment in the middle and say, I'm going to look into it.

for 10, 15 minutes, I'll be back to you in the afternoon or something like that and then explore what's involved before giving an immediate yes. This again is especially important if you saying yes means that work is going to be created for other people. Like not every urgent sounding task needs an immediate response.

Now, of course, sometimes the urgency is real. My background is in IT and when a Severity One incident happened, like the whole system goes down.

Of course, we want that resolved as quickly as possible. And it needs a quick response. But even then, taking a breath before acting can help you respond effectively, not frantically. Urgency and calm, they're not opposites like you can be fast without being frantic.

Now, before we wrap up, I have a few things I want you to think about. Has there been a situation in the last couple of days where you have had an urgency that came more from the person than the task? How did you handle it? And is there anything you think you can do differently after this conversation we're having today?

If you're a leader, I need to ask, are you the fire starter? Are you accidentally creating urgency in your team? What small change could you make this week to communicate better to them and to stop that cycle of frantic reaction?

And just finally, I want to say on a personal note, I think urgency is sometimes more of a feeling than a fact. And unless something has a critical deadline that has a concrete reason behind it, so often it's a reflection of how we're approaching our day or how we're responding to the requests around us. And it creates a ripple effect for others that you work with, obviously, if you're then pushing work onto them, as I mentioned.

but also it's just going to wrap you up in knots and create unnecessary tension in your day. And we all have so much to be doing anyway. So really taking a moment to pause and just trying to separate the task from the person can make all the difference.

If you found this helpful, I'd love it if you could let me know. You can like this video if you're watching on YouTube. That's how I know. If you're listening to it on a podcast platform, you can leave me a rating and a review to let me know what resonated with you. And more importantly, if you have a friend or a colleague who you think would benefit from this lesson today, please share the episode with them. OK, that's it. Until next time, stay well and have a better work day.