How to prioritise tasks when everything feels urgent

When everything feels urgent, nothing is urgent. But try telling that to your inbox, your team, or your own racing mind when fifteen ‘priority’ tasks are staring you down.

The problem isn’t that you have urgent tasks - it’s that you’ve lost the ability to distinguish real urgency from manufactured panic. Most organisations operate in a state of chronic false urgency, where every request gets marked ‘urgent’ and every deadline becomes a crisis. This creates a feedback loop: people learn to mark everything as urgent to get attention, which trains everyone to ignore urgency signals entirely.

The solution isn’t time management - it’s triage. You need a systematic way to cut through the noise and identify what actually deserves your immediate attention.

The hospital method for task triage

Emergency rooms don’t operate on first-come-first-served. They use triage systems that categorise patients based on severity, not arrival time. A heart attack gets treated before a broken finger, even if the broken finger arrived first.

Apply the same logic to your task list. Create four categories:

Red (Critical): System-down issues, genuine emergencies, tasks that block multiple people if not done today. These should be rare - if you have more than one red task per week, someone is calling wolf.

Yellow (Urgent but not critical): Important deadlines, client requests, tasks with genuine time constraints. Most of what people label ‘urgent’ actually belongs here.

Green (Important but not urgent): Strategic work, planning, relationship building. The stuff that prevents future red tasks but never feels pressing.

Blue (Neither urgent nor important): Administrative tasks, nice-to-haves, requests that can wait indefinitely without consequences.

The key insight from emergency medicine: you can’t upgrade a task’s category just because someone’s shouting about it. Triage nurses don’t bump up broken fingers because the patient is angry - they use objective criteria.

Why most people get urgent vs important backwards

The Eisenhower Matrix popularised the urgent/important distinction, but most people apply it backwards. They assume urgent means important, or they try to balance urgent and important work equally.

This misses the point entirely. Urgent tasks are often the least important ones in disguise. That ‘urgent’ email about updating the company directory? It’s neither urgent nor important - someone just used urgent as a synonym for ‘please do this now’.

Real urgent tasks have consequences that compound rapidly. A server outage becomes more expensive every minute it continues. A client crisis escalates if not addressed quickly. Everything else is just dressed-up importance or manufactured pressure.

Here’s the test: ask what happens if this task isn’t done today. If the answer is ‘someone will be annoyed’ or ‘it’ll be harder later’, it’s not urgent. If the answer involves actual damage, loss, or cascading failures, then it might be.

The two-question prioritisation filter

Skip the complex scoring systems and priority matrices. Use two questions:

1. What breaks if I don’t do this today?
2. Who else is blocked by this task?

Tasks that break things or block people get done first. Everything else gets scheduled based on importance, not manufactured urgency.

This filter cuts through most false urgency immediately. That project update email? Nothing breaks if it waits until tomorrow. The budget approval that three people are waiting for? That’s blocking people and needs attention.

The beauty of this system is that it forces requesters to justify urgency with consequences, not just emotions. When someone says their task is urgent, ask what breaks if it waits. Most of the time, the answer reveals it’s not urgent at all.

Managing the emotional weight of urgency

Here’s what nobody talks about: urgency is often psychological, not logical. When everything feels urgent, you’re usually overwhelmed, not facing genuine crises.

The solution isn’t to become callous to requests - it’s to separate the emotional weight from the actual priority. That panicked email from a client might feel urgent because of the tone, but the actual request might be completely routine.

Build in a cooling-off period for non-critical tasks. When something feels urgent but doesn’t meet your triage criteria, write it down and come back in an hour. The emotional urgency usually dissipates, leaving you with a clearer view of the actual priority.

This doesn’t mean ignoring people’s concerns - it means responding to the real problem instead of the emotional urgency. A client who sends a panicked email about a small issue probably needs reassurance more than immediate task completion.

The scheduler’s advantage

Most people try to prioritise their entire task list every day. This is exhausting and counterproductive. Instead, use time-blocking to make prioritisation decisions once, not constantly.

Schedule your important-but-not-urgent work during your best hours. Block specific times for responding to truly urgent issues. Everything else gets batched into designated times for less critical work.

When someone requests something ‘urgent’, you’re not deciding whether to drop everything - you’re deciding whether it belongs in your urgent time block or can wait for the next appropriate slot.

This removes the constant decision fatigue of re-prioritising and helps you see patterns in what people label as urgent. If someone’s requests always end up in your non-urgent blocks, you can have a conversation about their definition of urgency.

The goal isn’t perfect prioritisation - it’s sustainable prioritisation. You want a system that works under pressure and doesn’t require constant recalibration. When everything feels urgent, the last thing you need is a complicated priority system that adds to the chaos.

Some tasks will always feel more urgent than they are. Others will slip through and create real problems later. The point is to be wrong less often, and in less costly ways, than the current system of reactive panic.

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Quick reference

Triage: A system for prioritizing tasks or issues based on their urgency and importance, borrowed from medical emergency procedures.

Eisenhower Matrix: A decision-making framework that categorizes tasks into four quadrants based on urgency and importance levels.

Time-blocking: A scheduling method where you assign specific time slots to different types of work or tasks in advance.

Decision fatigue: The mental exhaustion that results from making too many decisions, which reduces the quality of subsequent choices.