Joyful Urgency

Have you ever forgotten to do some homework and hastily tried to complete it an hour before the start of the class? Or have you ever had to fix a broken website in the middle of the night? In these situations, procrastination ceases to exist: this is the power of urgency.

Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. 14-hour workdays with no clear time boundaries are often counter-productive: having too much time prevents us from doing better. Since urgency minimizes the available time, work gets done.

What’s even more interesting about the impact of urgency on our work is how it makes our environment completely irrelevant: we can work anywhere in any condition. There is something to get done as soon as possible, and it drives us through anything.

If we were to modify our work process to create a sense of urgency, we could probably do much more in less time. But if urgency leads to stress and anxiety, it could also harm us in the long run: we need something we could call “joyful urgency”.

Deadlines don’t work because of the latter reason. Instead, we need to leverage daily time limits, missions, and goals to force ourselves into the adequate state.

According to Deep Work, four hours of deep work seem to be the maximum amount of time we can count on, on a daily basis. Adding risk margins, we could say 6 hours seem to be a reasonable daily time limit to accomplish our work.