By Hel Reynolds (originally published in The Big Yellow Newsletter).
It’s 9.30am and you’ve got a plan for the day.
You’ve carved out time to work on your strategy. You’ve even made a nice cup of tea.
Then an email drops in with URGENT in the subject line.
And a Teams ping follows: someone wants a tiny update on something that has to be sorted by noon.
FFS.
“Come on then, let’s deal with this quickly”.
But then your flow has been interrupted.
And your plans for the day go down the drain.
Familiar?
That’s ‘the mere-urgency effect’ at work.
It’s behavioural bias that tricks your brain into thinking that just because something’s time-sensitive, it’s important.
Why this matter for comms
Researchers Zhu, Yang and Hsee found that that people often choose fast, deadline-driven tasks over slow, meaningful ones: even when the meaningful ones matter more.
And in comms, the urgent is EVERYWHERE.
Press releases. Last-minute posts. Random updates. All disguised as emergencies.
So the deep work, like developing your team, improving your channels, or thinking creatively, keeps getting bumped.
Not because it’s less important. Just because it’s less urgent.
But saying yes to everything urgent will leave you with beautifully updated content… but also a feeling that maybe you’re not making any progress at all.
🎯 Try this: Turn down the volume
I know how colleagues, journalists and the little voice in our own heads can be. You want to avert crisis, help out, put out fires. And their panic can be contagious.
But not everything should be treated as a ‘drop everything’ moment.
Before you take on a task, ask:
- Is this genuinely important?
- Or is it just shouting the loudest?
- What long-term work am I neglecting by saying yes?
You don’t have to manage this alone
If you’re tired of spending every day chasing the urgent and never reaching the important, Comms Creatives Academy helps you build comms impact using the five Cs: clarity, competence, confidence, creativity and capacity, so you’re steering your workload rather than letting it steer you.
