Why do we do unimportant things just because they are ‘urgent’? 

How do we decide which tasks to attend to at any given moment? Research indicates the answer is we don’t do this very well. 

A study¹ set out to examine how people decide what to work on when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance. Across five separate experiments, researchers observed a curious pattern: our attention is drawn to time-sensitive tasks over less urgent tasks, even when the less urgent task offers greater rewards. This psychological quirk, called the ”Mere-Urgency Effect”, explains why we’re so bad at task and time management.  

We’re more likely to prioritise tasks with a deadline over tasks without one, regardless of their long-term payoffs. We behave as if completing urgent tasks has its own appeal, regardless of the implications for tasks which are more important and impactful. 

Why do we do this? Five reasons were uncovered: 

• Important tasks are often more difficult and complex, and people are unwilling to expend the effort to perform such tasks  

• Urgent tasks are sometimes dependent on each other so missing one urgent task may result in a series of losses in the future.  

• Urgent tasks may be in high demand or have a low supply of people able to complete them, either of which could increase the perceived value of the task.  

• The payoffs of urgent tasks are often realised sooner, and people may value immediate payoffs more than future payoffs. It appears that the completion of a simple but urgent task may give us an out-of-proportion feeling of achievement and satisfaction.  

• The payoffs of important tasks may be further away from goal completion and less certain, which could decrease motivation  

And this effect is exaggerated in people who describe themselves as “busy”. Researchers found that self-described busy people were more likely to select urgent tasks with lower pay-outs because they were fixated on task duration and had an exaggerated awareness of time. In other words, if you’re already feeling a time crunch, you’ll likely continue to prioritise tasks that keep you focused on the clock. 

But, the good news is that this effect can be reversed.  When participants were prompted to consider the consequences of their choices at the time of selection, they were significantly more likely to choose the important task over the urgent one. The findings suggest that if you keep the long-term importance of non-urgent tasks in view, you can overcome the pull toward urgent distractions and focus on what matters. 

The findings also offer clear implications for managers who aim to increase the long-term well-being and productivity of their teams. Interventions that shift people’s attention away from the completion windows to the final outcomes of everyday tasks or the greater priorities in each role, should be particularly effective at counteracting the mere urgency effect, leading us to invest more time and effort in activities that matter most. This will benefit our well-being and result in better outcomes for the organisations that we work for, and with. 

Openside helps senior leaders to become more effective with their time, read more here.  

¹Zhu, Yang and See, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 45, Issue 3, October 2018