Productivity, Urgency and Completion

Continuing with the theme of the last lesson — that being busy doesn’t mean you’re always being productive — I’m going to approach this from another angle and discuss two other cognitive biases that cause the same problem. Understanding them will help you see what you might be doing wrong when you’re busy, exhausted, and still getting nowhere.

It’s easy to get caught up in tasks that don’t really need to be done, and there are two other cognitive biases that can lead to this. I’ll come on to them in due time. But first let’s talk about being busy, because being busy can be bad for your health. It can lead to excess stress, early mornings, late nights, missed meals, overload, overwhelm and exhaustion. We’ve all been there. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That feeling of being constantly behind, constantly scrambling, constantly trying to catch up but never quite making it.

In my line of work, I see the results of continued overload. I see the cracks in people starting to show, both mentally and physically. I see people who have just broken, and I see others who are just too busy digging themselves into an early grave that they’re too preoccupied to realise that what they’re spending most of their time doing is not really that good for them anymore, as well as not really being productive in any way. They’re busy, they’re stressed, they’re working themselves to death. But they’re not getting anywhere.

Being busy can be an active form of procrastination and a way to put off what really needs to be done. It’s easy to bury your head in the sand and put off what really needs to be done.

Have you ever thought that you can also be guilty of hiding behind your cluttered desk and of burying your head in your paperwork instead? You’re not avoiding work. You’re avoiding the right work by doing the wrong work. It’s a perfect disguise.

Another two biases that can lead us away from productivity are called the Urgency Bias and the Completion Bias. Both trade on a distinction popularised by Stephen Covey, whose time-management matrix sorts tasks by urgency and importance — an idea he traced back to a story President Eisenhower liked to tell about an unnamed college president: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.” Understanding these two biases will change how you see everything you do.

Urgency Bias is the tendency to prioritise tasks that seem urgent over those that are important. Urgency spurs us into action. This can be a sense of urgency, a deadline, or even just responding to things that are urgent to others but not to you. Mentally, we’re drawn to urgency like moths to a flame. It keeps us busy, and we lose sight of strategic plans or even the ability to plan in the first place.

Urgency gives us a quick patch to cover the problem rather than a long-term solution. Those short-term fixes can lead to a cascade of problems later on. Urgency consumes time and resources, and we lose sight of what’s productive. It feels productive in the moment because you’re rushing, you’re responding, you’re putting out fires. But you’re not building anything. You’re just preventing things from falling apart.

It’s easy to get lost in urgency, and it’s easy to get lost in what seems to be urgent as well. At times, it’s other people’s sense of urgency that sucks us in. Their crisis becomes your crisis. Their panic becomes your panic. Urgency means doing the unnecessary; it means interruption, and it means fitting a never-ending list of problems into the finite time you have. It’s a trap that feels like productivity but is actually the opposite.

The other bias we need to talk about is Completion Bias, which gives us a sense of achievement from completing tasks. Ticking that to-do off the list gives us a sense of reward. Neurologically, we get a tiny hit of dopamine with every tick we make. It feels good. Really good. So good that we start chasing that feeling instead of chasing progress.

Completion Bias means we’re drawn to the tasks that can easily be completed. At times, I’ve had to stop myself from adding stuff to my to-do list that’s already completed just for the thrill of ticking it off. I’m not kidding. That’s how powerful this bias is. You know you’ve done it too — written something down you’ve already done, so that you can immediately cross it off and get that little hit of satisfaction.

Completion Bias means we’re mentally steered away from the hard stuff toward the easy stuff, toward completion, and away from consistent effort toward longer goals that will take more time to finish. We get a positive feedback loop that’s generated when we’re rewarded for the completion of something small. We then want to do it more. We spend our efforts on housekeeping tasks rather than on the necessary stuff. Completion Bias takes us to the easy and away from the important.

Mix these two biases of Completion Bias and Urgency Bias together, and you’re up against it. Add increased workload to the mix, and your sense of urgency ramps up, too, and it’s far too easy to focus on what’s easy.

In my line of work, this can lead to disaster. Focusing on patients with easily fixed problems rather than the really sick patients only means the really sick patients will wait longer. The same principle applies to your life. Focusing on the easy wins means the important work never gets done.

Urgency Bias can trap us into needless tasks. Completion Bias rewards us for doing the mundane. We can easily get busy doing what’s not important, and put off the important stuff too long, and you’ll be firefighting even more in the future, fuelled by that urgent sense of needing to act, whilst also being driven towards the easy short-term fix. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds on itself.

It’s not too difficult to see how both of these biases can lead away from productivity and blindly along the road towards crisis. You’re working harder and harder, getting more and more exhausted, but somehow things are getting worse instead of better. That’s because you’re not doing the work that matters. You’re doing the work that feels urgent and the work that feels satisfying to complete.

The solution isn’t to work less. The solution is to work on the right things. You need to identify what’s actually important, not what feels urgent. You need to focus on the work that takes time and effort and doesn’t give you that quick dopamine hit, because that’s the work that actually moves you forward. That’s the work that builds something lasting.

Here’s what you need to understand. Important work is rarely urgent. By the time something important becomes urgent, you’ve already failed. You’ve waited too long, and now you’re in crisis mode. The goal is to do the important work before it becomes urgent, which means resisting both Urgency Bias and Completion Bias simultaneously. It means doing work that doesn’t feel satisfying in the moment but pays off in the long run.

This is hard. Really hard. It goes against every instinct you have. Your brain wants the quick win, the immediate reward, the sense of urgency that makes you feel needed. But if you want to be productive instead of just busy, you need to fight those instincts. You need to ignore the easy tasks calling your name. You need to ignore the urgent but unimportant fires that everyone else wants you to put out.

You need to ask yourself every time you start a task whether it is important or just urgent, and whether it is meaningful or just easy to complete. Most of the time, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll realise you’re doing it because it feels good, not because it matters. That’s okay. Now that you know, you can choose differently.

The people who achieve something are the ones who resist these biases. They’re not busier than you. They’re not working harder than you. They’re just working smarter and on the right things. They’ve learned to ignore the siren call of urgency and the addictive hit of completion. They’ve learned to sit with the discomfort of doing work that takes time, that doesn’t give immediate rewards, that doesn’t feel satisfying in the moment.

You can do this too. You just need to recognise when these biases are running the show, and choose to do something different. It won’t feel natural at first. It’ll feel like you’re being lazy or avoiding work. You’re not. You’re being strategic. You’re being productive instead of just busy. There’s a massive difference, and it’s these two biases that most people never figure out.

Productivity, Urgency and Completion

Further reading

Common Sense and Common Action

Blind Spot Bias

The Affect Heuristic

Probabilistic Thinking

Confirmation Bias

Further reading

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