The finding
An important-but-not-urgent objective can be genuinely agreed by an entire leadership team, formally tracked, and still lose, quarter after quarter, to whatever currently feels most pressing. This is not a story about weak commitment. It’s a well-documented, specific bias in how people choose between tasks — one that operates even when the person choosing knows, correctly, which task actually matters more.
Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee’s research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2018, names this the “mere urgency effect.” Across five separate experiments, they found that people consistently choose less important tasks over more important ones specifically when the less important task carries a spurious sense of urgency — even when every rational reason to prefer the urgent task has been deliberately controlled for in the study design. Participants weren’t making a mistake about which task mattered more. They knew. They chose the urgent one anyway.
The mechanism the researchers identify is what makes this finding genuinely useful rather than simply descriptive: urgency creates a specific, narrow completion window that feels psychologically pressing in a way an important task’s larger, more distant payoff does not, regardless of how much bigger that payoff actually is. An email that needs a reply today competes, in the moment, on remarkably even terms with a strategic initiative worth ten times as much over the coming year — not because anyone has done that comparison and concluded they’re equivalent, but because only one of the two comes with a deadline attached that feels like it’s closing right now.
Why this looks like a discipline problem
Because the pattern shows up as a series of individual choices, it tends to get diagnosed as a series of individual failures. Someone keeps letting the strategic initiative slip. Someone isn’t protecting their calendar properly. Someone needs to get better at saying no.
Consider an organisation with a quarterly objective that has slipped for four consecutive quarters, displaced each time by something that was, in the moment, genuinely urgent — a client escalation, a staffing gap, a deadline pulled forward. Every individual decision to prioritise the urgent matter over the standing objective was, on its own terms, defensible. What the research suggests, though, is that this outcome doesn’t actually require anyone to be careless. It’s the predictable result of leaving an important objective to compete, unprotected, against a steady stream of tasks that each carry their own immediate, narrow deadline.
This reframes the usual response. Coaching an individual to exercise better judgement addresses a problem that, per the research, isn’t actually about that individual’s judgement. Zhu, Yang, and Hsee’s experimental design specifically controlled for the normative reasons someone might rationally choose an urgent task over an important one — a closer deadline, a more certain payoff, a preference for clearing small tasks before tackling large ones. The effect persisted even once all of those rational explanations were accounted for, which is precisely what makes it a genuine bias rather than a reasonable trade-off dressed up as one.
What it means in practice
The practical implication isn’t that urgency should be ignored — genuinely urgent matters are, by definition, genuinely urgent. The implication is narrower: an important objective that has no protection of its own will keep losing to urgent tasks, not because it’s less important, but because urgency itself is doing work in the decision that has nothing to do with actual importance.
Protection, in the terms the research points toward, means something structural rather than motivational — a genuinely reserved block of time or capacity that urgent tasks cannot simply absorb by virtue of feeling more pressing that particular week. Organisations that succeed in protecting an important-but-not-urgent objective tend to do so by giving it something urgency-adjacent of its own: a fixed review point, a visible consequence for slippage, a standing allocation of time that isn’t first offered up whenever something else feels pressing. None of this removes urgency from the equation. It gives the important objective a structural defence against a bias that, left unaddressed, will keep selecting against it regardless of how much everyone in the room agrees it matters.
There’s a governance dimension worth naming directly. An organisation’s stated priorities are, in effect, a set of claims about what it has decided matters most. When those priorities consistently lose to whatever feels urgent that week, the stated priorities and the organisation’s actual behaviour quietly diverge — not through any single decision to abandon them, but through the accumulated effect of a bias that the research shows operates on virtually everyone, in virtually every context tested. Recognising this as a structural vulnerability, rather than a series of individual lapses, is what makes it possible to actually govern against it, rather than repeating the same conversation every time the pattern resurfaces.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- Does your organisation’s most important current objective have any structural protection against urgency, or does it rely entirely on people remembering, week after week, that it matters more than whatever is loudest that day?
- Which objectives are at risk not because anyone has stopped caring, but because importance alone is competing against urgency with nothing structural behind it?
This perspective is part of Governance.
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