Open Thread: Can You Live Without Urgency?
April 15th, 2008 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 5 CommentsTweet This
Over at the 37Signals company blog, they’ve recently posted a piece titled “Urgency is poisonous.” In it, they say that they’ve found moving to a 4-day workweek without timeclocks to be good for the company. They go on to say “urgency is overrated” and to propose that just about everything can wait a few days to get done.
Looking around at web worker culture, though, it’s hard to believe that many web workers would agree. With our always-on connectivity and fretting about work-life balance, it seems that we’re not only immersed in urgency, we’re addicted to it: we need to know what is happening right now, and then Get Things Done to deal with it.For that matter, there’s a thread of business culture that goes back at least as far as Ben Franklin musing on the benefits of “early to bed, early to rise.” The default assumption is that there is a good reason for urgency, at least if you want to be the one who gets the sales and the success.
How do you feel about urgency in your own career? Are things out of whack and stressing you out too much? Have you managed to strike a balance and turn off the urgency? Or are you convinced that your continued attention to fast action will enable you to take business away from your slacker competitors?
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Urgency is crap. Everyone behaves as though lives hang in the balance.
Hm… first comment kinda cuts to the chase.
There’s nothing about working on the web that dictate urgency. In the vast majority of cases running around doing 18 projects, having time to eat lunch and sleeping with your iBerry* under your pillow is a sign of poor planning and insecurity, not success.
*ohh, no one sue me, ok?
I have to agree, especially with the blackberry comment. Making yourself always available just trains people to bother you at inappropriate times.
I think that there is a time and place for urgency. Being able to recognize when it is appropriate and respond accordingly is critical, as is doing the opposite.
For me, constant urgency would be toxic.
SB
Of course (we can live without urgency).
That is what we did and do for centuries.
Urgency –and multitasking- is the evil resulted from american work culture gone global.
But, apart from different attitudes towards life, urgently doing things rarely makes them properly done.
In Europe we say “even God has to wait for sugar to melt”. You think everything is able to be done “yesterday”.
After 30 years of craziness, hearing Americans revaluing urgency is encouraging.