Why I kept choosing loud over important, and what a 2018 study taught me about fixing it.
Curator’s Note: The author reflects on the tendency to prioritize urgent tasks over important ones, highlighting the detrimental effects of urgency on productivity and relationships. Urgent notifications and interruptions hijack attention, leading to wasted time on less meaningful activities. This behavior stems from a psychological bias where deadlines create an illusion of urgency, often at the expense of what truly matters, like deep conversations and focused work. Drawing from Charles Hummel’s concepts and recent studies, the author emphasizes the need to proactively manage distractions, establish personal deadlines, and protect meaningful interactions, ultimately reorienting priorities to safeguard what truly matters.
Urgency demands attention. What matters rarely does. The challenge is learning to protect the quiet, important things before the loud ones take over.
For years I assumed my scattered attention was a discipline issue. More willpower, better apps, a stricter schedule: surely one of those would fix it.
It turns out the real culprit wasn’t focus at all. It was urgency.
The Notification I Kept Answering
I used to leave notifications on across every device I owned. Phone, laptop, watch. I told myself it made me responsive and reliable.
Here’s what it actually looked like. I’d sit down to write something that mattered to me. A few sentences in, a badge would light up in the corner of the screen. I’d tell myself I’d just glance at it. I never just glanced. By the time I looked up, fifteen minutes were gone, and so was the thread I’d been pulling on in my head.
Some days I did this a dozen times before lunch and still felt like I’d worked hard the whole morning. In a way, I had. Just not on the thing I actually cared about.
It showed up somewhere more personal too. I’d be in a real conversation with someone I loved, and my phone would ring. I’d answer it mid-sentence, and the person in front of me would have to wait.
The call felt urgent. It was happening right now. But was it actually more important than the conversation I was already in? Almost never. It just had a louder claim on my attention, not a stronger one.
An Old Idea, Newly Confirmed
In 1967, Charles Hummel wrote a pamphlet called The Tyranny of the Urgent, arguing that what derails a meaningful life usually isn’t laziness. It’s the constant pull of loud, demanding things over quiet, important ones.
Important work tends to be patient. Urgent things buzz, ring, and interrupt.
Nearly sixty years later, researchers Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee put Hummel’s observation to the test. Across five experiments, they found people repeatedly picked less valuable, time-pressured tasks over more valuable ones with no deadline attached, even when the payoff difference was obvious. They named it the “mere urgency effect.”
I ruled out the easy explanations myself, in my own head, long before I read the study. It wasn’t that the urgent task was simpler, or that skipping it had real costs.
A visible deadline alone was enough to hijack my decisions, creating what the researchers called an illusion of expiration: a false sense that the window is closing, similar to how a “limited stock” label makes a mediocre product feel worth grabbing immediately.
Why This Feels So Familiar
I know the mechanism from the inside. A call feels urgent, so it feels important, even when, on reflection, it almost never is.
Meanwhile the things that actually matter to me (a hard conversation, deep work, a relationship) rarely interrupt me. They just wait, and I quietly shortchange them.
The cost isn’t only lost time. It’s relational. Every time I let an alert win out over the person sitting across from me, I send a message I never intended but that lands anyway: whoever’s calling matters more than you do right now.
You Can Be Productive and Still Waste Your Life
This is the part nobody wants to say out loud. I could answer every email, attend every meeting, return every call, keep everyone happy, and reach the end of the week without spending an hour on the thing I said mattered most.
That’s not a time management problem. It’s a priority problem, and no productivity app was going to fix it, because the pull toward urgency isn’t a bug in me specifically. It’s a documented bias in how the human mind weighs a deadline against a payoff.
What Actually Helps
Because urgency short-circuits my reasoning in the moment, I’ve learned the fix has to happen beforehand, while my judgment is still intact.
I sort my notifications instead of just silencing them. A short list of real people gets through. Everything designed to manufacture urgency, apps, news, social platforms, gets muted entirely.
I give important work its own deadline. If urgency wins by creating a false sense of expiration, I can use the same trick honestly: a real block of time, a visible timer, a promise to show someone a draft by Thursday.
I ask whose urgency it actually is. Most incoming demands belong to the sender, not to me. A quick gut check, is this urgent to me or urgent to them, filters out a lot of false alarms.
I protect people the way I’d protect a meeting with my boss. I’d never answer a ringing phone in front of my boss. I try to extend that same default to the people I love.
The Better Morning Question
Instead of asking myself what I need to get done today, I’ve started asking a better question: what matters enough that I should protect it from everything else?
The urgent will always find me. The important rarely does, which is exactly why I have to defend it.
About the Author:
Gary L. Fretwell is a #1 international best-selling author blending neuroscience with Stoic philosophy to help people build a life of lasting significance. He’s the author of eight books on intentional living and retirement, including the #1 bestseller The Magic of a Moment and Intentional Retirement.
On Medium, Gary founded and edits Illumination: Retirement, Aging & Legacy.
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