URGENT TASKS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM WITH OKR

There’s a common thought that people would work better and more effectively when things get rush. As a matter of fact, this idea does not always work and sometimes even affect your working process negatively. As a marketer, I also have so many works to do and many times (not just sometimes), they became urgent tasks, luckily, I’ve realized this trap and snapped out of it quick enough before everything went wrong.

1. Why you are always in urgent state?

a. Filling up your timetable with a bunch of small tasks without any plan

There is a story that could easily illustrate this one. Suppose that all of your important business, both in life and work are the big rocks, while your not-so-important stuff are smaller stones. If you try hard to fill up a crystal bottle (which is an imitation of your life) with all that small ones, how can you add the other big rocks. At this moment, you dementedly throw all that unimportant task out of your life and important works get urgent. Your balancing life has been destroyed and it’ll take sometimes to recover.

That’s the reason why you have to point out which tasks are important to you the most and put them on your calendar first then fill the blank with the others. Bang! Urgency has been gone.

b. Confusing importance with urgency

Sometimes, when taking on a work, you also take the complains from your boss, peers or even your employees. I used to put those type of works on the urgent task category, got to do those first, immediately. Actually, there are many activities not worth to put on this list, but it’s because of our procrastinating thoughts: “It’s okay, I’ll just surf Facebook 10 minutes!”, “After watching this movie, I’ll work on it!”, etc. Then, all the workload you need to finish after a week or two still there, and they will only be done one night before the deadline or it will just exceed the deadline.

c. You adopt the urgency idea:

We cannot deny the profits which urgency bring in. When a work needs immediate attention, you might finish it in a shorter time, you could train yourself to do multiple tasks at the same time. So, most people feel that the “sense of urgency” is really important to them.

Back in the day when I was still at school, I have fooled myself to work with the maximum effort by using this “sense of urgency”, especially when the final exams came. This habit gradually started and followed me up until the day I become a worker, that time, instead of ignoring the examinations, I then neglected the deadline. If this is happening to you, I am sure that you have fell into the sense of urgency habit. Day after day, if you cannot control it, the consequence you have to suffer will be terrible.

2. What could happen?

There are my experiences when I depended on urgency too much and this led to many bad outcomes:

a. You cannot have a broad vision for your organization:

When working under pressure, you might have no time left to watch and observe your whole system. You might forget the damages that your procrastination does to your colleagues. This does not come alone, but also raises many issues, including: duplicate tasks, task missing, internal argument, etc. This is especially harmful to some industries that need a lot coordination within organization such as: PR, application producing, marketing, etc.

This problem could disturb your organization’s primary goal/objective or lead your attention to some unrelated urgent tasks and your working process will not sync with the rest of your company. The outcome maybe varies: your whole process could not be done on time, or worse, the whole project or strategy could be destroyed.

b. Your creativity will be limited

Even with the most boring job, creativity is always in need so that a person could successfully finish it. However, how could you be creative in such short time and under such stress from your peers or co-workers? And also, focusing is the necessary condition so that creativity could happen. Most of us, however, cannot control our mind to concentrate on a task enough to stimulate the creativity inside you in short time.

c. The internal communication may break

Communication is the direct factor that affects one organization’s success. If you always have to rush for doing something urgently, the mess, the disruption will show up in the middle of your communication process which comes along with internal argument (like I have mentioned above), company culture break.

Don’t wait until everyone in the organization has to yell at each other: “Where are we now?”, “Why didn’t not you finish these?”, etc. This makes the pressure even more stressful, may start controversy in the office and blocks you from finishing the work when your colleagues keep buzzing around you. Have you got not enough stress?

d. The performance may be reduced

The three consequences above all lead to one bigger result: your performance and productivity will not be as you or your manager have expected. The problem does not only affect your working process, but also it becomes a big obstacle to your employees, peers or your boss. And there are 2 scenarios could happen to you. If your employees are good or lucky enough to realize the bug in your work, they can correct them before everything goes wrong and continue the working process. Or, unfortunately, your co-workers do not acknowledge the issue, your team or department’s plan will be badly crushed, and the organization’s effort will be down the drain in the period of 2 or 3 month.

And we go to the conclusion that: urgency kills productivity.

3. Well, OKR can help you!

After a while since I applied the sense of urgency into most of the tasks, it was like I have put one foot in this trap, and things only got better when my company began to use OKR method.

If you are still unclear about OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology, you could find out more here while three below paragraphs will be about the benefits of OKR in pulling out the sense of urgency in your work.

a. Transparency

Thanks to the transparency within the organization, every member or individual could find out who is responsible for whichever task. This allows you to immediately contact that person when issues arise, you don’t have to wait until the deadline comes and that assignment becomes urgent then fix it. With OKR, every move or objective or key result will be followed by the whole organization.

b. Directional tracking

OKR assists you in planning your realistic goals within a timeframe. Then it needn’t to decide which task is crucial, which is urgent or which is unimportant to arrange. Besides, you can adopt some tools designed to track your OKRs like spreadsheet, or there are also some applications like Goalify which will help you manage your objective and these applications are also able to tell you if the progress is on track or at risk. Because of these tools, managers or employees now are able to align their plans to fit every level of their organization. This saves you from hours of procrastination - the main reason of urgency.

c. Recognition

There is one undeniable fact that appraisal makes us happy. Pride and satisfaction are the two reactions when a person receives the recognition or positive feedbacks. These good feelings are released thanks to Dopamine hormone inside your body, and this helps your employees complete their tasks in the most effective way. This is the fundamental element that could boost your staff’s working spirit, remove the delay of your work. Also, OKR performs with the sense of transparency, so one reward or recognition can be acknowledged by the rest of your company, and be the motivation for them.

You can catch up with other benefits of OKR for your organization not only in limiting the damages of urgency on Goalify’s blogs here.