I was in an email conversation with a Creative Giant who was discussing how moving to the UK from Chicago displaced a lot of her projects but gave her new insights about how she got stuff done. She mentioned this about firefighting:
Oddly enough, being in firefighting mode was in some ways helpful, as I eliminated a lot of distractions and as a result got some important projects done. Now I know what I have to do next, and the trick is to plan it and do it — which is where the momentum planners come in handy! When I was just trying to keep my head above water, I didn’t use them — it’s when my day is no longer ruled by the urgent stuff that I need to make an effort to focus.
This indirectly highlights one of the challenges people have with planning (and our planners): urgency minimizes the need for holistic planning simply because whatever’s urgent requires our focus and capabilities to get done. If something’s burning, you don’t need to pull out a planner and productivity app to figure out what needs to be done, who all is involved, what success looks like, and so on. You just put the fire out, immediately.
Since our society is ruled by urgency, we have become really good at living, working, and thinking reactively. It’s a good day when we’re only reacting to one urgent thing, though, so we’ve also become good at tending to multiple urgencies at once. We’re like the cat in the gif below:
I tried to take on Monday and Tuesday one at a time, but they attacked me at the same time. pic.twitter.com/0eO7iO6HW4
— Charlie Gilkey (@CharlieGilkey) August 16, 2016
We’re multi-tasking, multi-project juggling masters of the now. Rinse, repeat.
No mind that our bodies suffer. No mind that our hearts suffer. No mind that our relationships suffer. No mind that our spirits suffer.
There’s no time to worry about that stuff in the deluge of urgency. Plus, taking time out for yourself is incredibly selfish; people need you to do something right now.
But to worry about something, you have to be aware that there’s a problem. To be aware of the problem requires a pause and reflection that, again, we don’t have time for. We don’t stop before we have to.
I wish I were being hyperbolic about where we are or that perhaps I’m seeing a non-representative sample of people, but my hunch is that the people I’m seeing know the tyranny of the urgent isn’t working for them.
Starting the habit of proactive, adaptive planning thus isn’t just a matter of knowing how to do things like deciding which projects matter most, setting good goals, chunking projects down, writing good action items, and getting a project through the almost-done-but-can-easily-get-stuck zone before it’s finished. These are all important skillsets to continually practice, for sure, but the reality is that people only feel worse when they know they have the skills they need but seem unable to apply them.
Breaking Free from the Urgency Spiral Requires Continual Effort
Cultivating the habit of planning for success also depends on us altering the way we exist in the world and realizing to what degree we’re feeding the fires we’re continually rushing to put out. Because we have no time, we don’t make time to make time and are thus further behind and don’t have time. Because we’re treating our bodies merely like head transportation vehicles, our energy flags and our bodies hurt, creating the situation where we don’t have the energy and vitality to exercise and eat better or just succumb to decision fatigue because we don’t have the energy and vitality. Because we have no boundaries, we’re over-taxed and can’t muster the courage to set or renegotiate boundaries.
We thus get caught in a downward urgency spiral that’s maintained by self-reinforcing feedback loops. Reversing or interrupting a self-reinforcing feedback loop is considerably harder than just stopping one thing on one day, as the feedback loops in the system create tie-ins that keep the system going. It requires change on multiple items through time.
The good news is that positive feedback loops work the same way. Good habits lead to good outcomes that reinforce the good habits. Tending to relationships lead to better relationships that are more nourishing and easier to tend to. And so on.
Though positive and negative spirals work the same way, it can be more challenging to reverse or interrupt a negative spiral because part of the system comes from our relationships with other people. People who want to quit smoking struggle partly because they likely have friends who smoke; giving up smoking is thus giving up their friends. Because so many people expect urgent communication, we’re pressured to keep up. Major diet changes affect relationships with friends given how many of our social activities center around foods that often aren’t healthy.
How Do We Break the Urgency Spiral While Still Channeling Focused Energy?
Something I’ve been exploring over the last few years is how to channel the clarity and sense of purpose we get from firefighting scenarios (“mission mode”) into future-building activities. This isn’t one of those theoretical, “how can I figure this out for other people?” explorations — I need to figure it out for myself. I’m a genius in a crisis or when my back is up against a wall. I’ve not been as effective and prolific when the coast is clear, even when I’ve deliberately and effectively got out of the urgency cycle long enough to recover and reset.
The planning methodologies I use and share help considerably at identifying where I want things to go and how to get there, but that focus, performance, and drive I get when in mission mode is often the missing piece. I’ve gotten better over the last few years, but I’ve still got a ways to go, and I’m open to the possibility that the positive spirals I’ve been cultivating haven’t clearly offset the persistent negative spirals that I’m feeding (directly or indirectly) in other ways.
I’m sharing all this just in case you’re also at the point where you realize your head has what it needs, but your heart and hands haven’t gotten on board to the same degree. Mindsets and heartsets always trump skillsets; make sure you’re feeding what actually needs to grow.
So I don’t leave you with a cliffhanger, here are some questions to ponder if you’re wanting to break free from the urgency spiral:
- What’s underneath the patterns and habits that keep you in the urgency spiral?
- What do you need to give yourself permission to let go of beliefs and stories that aren’t serving you? (Is it time to leave the canoe behind?)
- What would you do differently if you knew that you’re modeling the urgency spiral to someone you love?
- What would you do differently if you believed you were already competent, worthy, and deserving of love and success?
- Who in your life is modeling and reinforcing the urgency spiral for you and how might you address it?
Here’s to building your positive spirals. 🙂
Charlie… I just pondered this exact concept (but not in those terms) these past few days… after months of procrastinating I set myself a deadline to finish a project and pretty much whipped it out in a matter of fully focused, driven, purposeful days (last week).
I’m very good at that. I know I’m great in a crisis, I respond, manage and multi-task effectively when the pressure is on… but can while away the days with no direction, aimless and wondering what the hell I’m doing for too much time in-between. On or off, I seem to only have two speeds! LOL
I resist deadlines, yet I know I need them. I hate structure but do well within the framework of it. And after a couple of failed attempts at planning, scheduling and trying to manage my ‘work week’ this past year or two… I have sat with your planners in front of me (again) the past few days wondering how to make it work without boxing myself into a situation that repels me from my workspace and makes me want to lie listless in front of Netflix rubbish.
Your post and your questions are very timely… I’m going with Q2… and I’ve got a whole unscheduled day to ponder it.
Bravo 🙂
I’m glad this resonated, Ally. Deadlines are a funny thing. We hate them yet need them. At the right pulse, though, they can be incredibly beneficial. About pulse, I mean finding that Goldilocks period of not too much time between the next relevant deadline, but not so much time that we don’t work towards it.
Great post, Charlie! I used to be an all-emergency-all-the-time worker, and I think that I’ve have been thrown much farther of course these last few months if I’d never taken the time to learn about productivity and planning. So trying to be proactive rather than reactive sometimes fails when things get tough, but the habits I learned did ensure that I did the MOST important work while juggling the other stuff and was ready much sooner to get back into proactive mode.
This. 100%. Thanks, Jane!
Great, insightful and thought-provoking post, Charlie.
It’s helping me put some pieces together in why things have been a struggle for me recently. I’ve had more childcare since January — after spending the whole of 2016 waiting impatiently for this! — and *everything* feels urgent. My two ebooks that are embarrassingly out-of-date (now one down, one to go). Marketing my novels. Revamping my membership site. Finishing my novella. Revamping my third novel (just had it back from my editor).
All the stuff that I simply couldn’t tackle for the last year or two (when my time and energy was mostly taken up with the kids) now feels so overdue that it all has to be done RIGHT NOW. And of course it can’t be!
Q4 resonated with me. I feel unsuccessful right now — *visibly* unsuccessful (though this is rather hubristic, as I don’t suppose that anyone is actually paying much attention to or caring around how “successful” I look…) I feel like more and more of the people in my life are people who know me only as a mother, not as a writer and blogger and entrepreneur.
Maybe this is another post entirely… how to handle things, as an entrepreneur, when you come out of a period where you’ve been unable to work much (illness, caring for relative, having babies, etc) and when there is inevitably a huge backlog of things that would ideally have been done a year ago…!
Great to see you, Ali!
For what it’s worth, your being a mom is still a new thing to me AND that’s likely because we met before you were a mom. As we’ve discussed – I think – it’s been uncertain how best to start our convos now, because I want to ask how you and your family are doing, but I also don’t want to reinforce your feeling that people think about you as a mom (solely).
So how ’bout this? Know that I’m always interested in how the kids and family are doing and open to hearing about them, but if I’m asking you about writing-related stuff, it’s because I’d like to hold that space for you. Deal?
Synchronicity! The car accident and other Life Stuff sidelined me for awhile, and then I ended up feeling rusty and having the recovery-rush syndrome (where you recover, then rush out of recovery to catch up on lost time). Feeling rusty and recovery-rushing push you in opposite directions. I’ll definitely write more about this – it’s actually one of the reasons I mentioned in . Standby.
Super, looking forward to more on this!
I don’t mind at all people asking about the kids. They’re doing well, thanks. 🙂
One of the difficult things, for me, is treading in two different worlds. In one, I’m a writer and while I’m open about being a mother too, I’m a writer foremost.
In the other, I’m a writer. I’m at the school gates in the mornings. I work for myself, when most mums I know locally are either stay-at-home mothers or employees. When I was talking about work with one mum, and told her about having more childcare now and that “I love my work”, she said “Not many people can say that.” That made me feel awkward and almost guilty.
So another thing I’d love to hear you write about — because I know this is something you must have experienced in a couple of different ways — is that experience of having one foot in each of two worlds. How do you navigate in that divide?
(This also used to crop up for me between “academic creative writing degree” and “blogging / entrepreneurial writing”, back in 2008 – 10 when I was studying for my MA. So perhaps it’s a problem in me rather than in the specific situations of my life, but I assume it’s a struggle that other people have too?)
Those are great topics, Ali. And they’re definitely things that we all struggle with. In the hopper! 🙂
Thanks, Charlie. I just found your site, and I’m grateful for the work you’re doing–on your own life and helping others in theirs.
This post resonates with a current challenge of mine–trying to get out of the urgency spiral once and for all. I was able to get to the source of the spiral, the thing which drives out-of-balance effort and the kinds of negative thoughts that seem to make the spiral go faster. Now, if I can just tackle this ONE thing. Since I don’t know exactly what levers will be the ticket, I’m planning on massive action (read: more out-of-balance effort) in the hopes of putting it to bed. Not to say there won’t be ebbs and flows of urgency and chill after this is tackled, but hopefully none as drastic as the ones I’ve experienced recently. Which also makes me realize that probably the best question for me to answer long term is #4–I think my sense of “value” is the driver of all this nonsense. Though on a good day (read: not on the urgency spiral), that very statement doesn’t even make sense to me. 🙂
What an interesting journey we’re on.