The Tyranny of the Urgent

A few days ago at Flatirons Church, Jim Burgen used a phrase that has stayed with me ever since: the tyranny of the urgent.

I had heard the words before, but for whatever reason, this time they landed differently. Maybe it was timing. Maybe it was because I have been feeling stretched in a dozen different directions lately. Maybe it was because the phrase gave a name to something I have struggled to explain for a long time. The thing that wears me down most is not always the volume of work in front of me. It is the feeling that all of it matters right now.

An email comes in and feels like it needs an immediate response. A text changes the direction of the next hour. A meeting appears on the calendar. Someone needs a decision. Something breaks. A deadline moves closer. There is always one more thing asking to move to the front of the line, and after a while it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what is truly important and what simply arrived most recently.

That, I think, is where urgency becomes tyrannical. It does not have to prove that something matters. It only has to be loud enough to capture our attention.

For those of us who work in golf, that kind of environment can feel almost normal. The work is deeply relational and highly reactive. Members need something. Staff members need direction. A tournament changes the rhythm of the week. Weather rearranges the day. A board member has a question. A candidate calls. A problem surfaces that no one saw coming.

Responsiveness is part of doing the job well, and there is something good in that. We should care about people. We should follow through. We should be dependable.

But I am beginning to see how easily responsiveness can turn into a life built around reaction.

When that happens, everything starts to feel like a priority. And if everything is a priority, then nothing really is.

The more I have thought about it, the more I realize that this is one of the main sources of stress in my own life. It is not simply having a lot to do. I have had busy seasons before, and I probably always will. What drains me is the sense that every responsibility is competing for the same immediate attention, and that if I do not respond quickly enough, something important is going to fall apart.

The problem is that when I live that way for too long, I stop making conscious choices about what deserves my attention. I start allowing the next thing to choose for me.

And the things that tend to lose are rarely the loud things. They are usually the quiet ones.

My family does not always announce itself as urgent. My faith does not interrupt the workday with a notification. Time to think, pray, rest, or simply be present with the people I love does not usually come with a deadline attached. Those things are important precisely because they are foundational, but because they are not constantly demanding attention, they can be pushed aside almost without noticing.

That is where this idea moved beyond productivity for me and became something more spiritual. I believe God gives us responsibilities, relationships, abilities, and opportunities for a reason. I believe there is purpose in the work we do and in the people we have been entrusted to love and serve. But I also believe it is possible to spend our days consumed by things that look productive while slowly drifting away from the things that matter most.

And I do not think that drift always comes from something obviously bad. Most of the time, it probably does not.

It comes from a hundred small things that seem reasonable in the moment. One more email before dinner. One more call on the drive home. One more meeting we probably did not need. One more time saying, “I’ll get to that later,” to something that actually matters more than whatever replaced it.

That is what bothers me about this idea. The urgent usually does not look sinister. It looks responsible. It looks productive. It looks like doing your job well. And because of that, it becomes very easy to justify.

I can convince myself that I am just being responsive, just trying to help, just getting through a busy week. Sometimes that is exactly what I am doing. But sometimes, if I am being truthful with myself, I am letting work expand into every space available to it and then acting surprised when there is not much left for anything else.

I do not think the answer is to become less committed to our work or less available to the people we serve. I care too much about both of those things to believe that. What I am trying to get better at is recognizing that not every request deserves the same weight, and not every problem deserves to become my problem right this second.

That sounds obvious when I write it down. It is much harder when the phone is buzzing.

Maybe that is why I keep coming back to this question: if I say yes to this thing in front of me, what am I saying no to without realizing it?

Sometimes the answer is nothing consequential. Sometimes it is fifteen minutes of television or a little sleep I can afford to lose. But other times the answer is a conversation with my wife, being fully present with my daughters, time in prayer, or simply enough quiet to hear myself think.

Those are not dramatic losses. That may be why they are easy to miss.

But I am starting to believe that a life gets built that way, in pieces so small that we barely notice we are choosing them.

I do not expect to solve this perfectly. I am probably always going to have seasons when work is heavy, when the calendar gets away from me, when something truly urgent takes priority over something I would rather be doing. That is part of life, and probably part of caring deeply about what you do.

What I do not want is to wake up one day and realize that “busy” became my default explanation for why the things I claimed mattered most kept getting whatever was left. That is the part of Jim’s phrase that has stayed with me.

The tyranny is not that urgent things exist. They always will. It's that if we're not intentional, little by little, they can begin making choices for us.