Urgency Addiction is not Job Insurance

Louis Columbus

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

People are battling against the uncertainty of their jobs, the economy and their company’s futures by taking on more work than ever. Overcomitting and being hyper-responsive is the new job insurance mirage.

I’ve seen my good friends increasingly see urgency addiction as job insurance this year like none before. The more battered the industry the higher the urgency addiction. One friend is in the mortgage industry and he has always been ultra-responsive, yet now he is in alert-mode constantly.

Now don’t take this as a blog post about getting off the grid; I am all for being passionately consumed about what you do and getting immersed in it. That is the only way to live.

My point is that when urgency addiction is seen as some form of flimsy job insurance – a mirage if you will – people sell themselves short of what they could accomplish.

Killing distractions or at least controlling those gives people the freedom to do their best work – those projects and tasks that make their passion of what they do abundantly clear. Urgency addiction and the anxiety it’s based on short-changes some of the best people I know from doing excellent work.

On Sunday June 22 Marci Alboher wrote an excellent column for the New York Times titled Fighting the War Against Distraction. It’s an interview with Maggie Jackson, author of the book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here are some insights Maggie Johnson shared in the New York Times column:

• An astounding 28% of a worker’s day is consumed in interruptions (Basex) and recovery time. Ms. Johnson states in her book that it takes up to 30 minutes to recover from an interruption, citing Gloria Mark who leads research in the area of interruption science.

• "Under deadline pressure, workers produce creative work on days when they are focused, not when they are scattered and interrupted, a study published in the Harvard Business Review found" as cited from the New York Times article.

• "In meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost, argues Nathan Zeldes, a senior engineer at Intel and a leader of the nonprofit Information Overload Research Group" as cited from the New York Times article as well.

My favorite quote of all from the series of blog entries and articles all emanating from the New York Times article mentioned below is "Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites."

Julie Morgenstern of BusinessWeek.com, one of my favorite writers on time management, wrote a blog entry on this topic on June 24 titled Concentration Conundrum, which is worth checking out. The graphic in this blog entry is from her post. I’ve read her book Time Management from the Inside Out and it’s excellent; it was a gift when our daughter was born and Julie Morgenstern’s tips were really helpful for us as new parents.

Resolving to tackle the larger, more complex projects and ignore the immediate gratification of firing back quick e-mails or voice mails may paradoxically be the best job insurance of all.

Comments

[Louis Columbus]

Nathan,
Agreed and the most hard-core urgency addicts would not tolerate being any other way. What led me to write this blog post was the fact that I'm starting to see friends with young families choosing Saturday mornings in the office over being with them. Or spending all night to get ahead on work at the expense of hours with their younger children. The tough and uncertain economic times are making people choose to never shut work off. The article in the New York Times caught my eye, and the departure of Charlene Li from Forrester this week to spend more time with her family is another case in point. Thanks for your comment, and you're right, hardcore urgency addicts will have it no other way.

[Nathan Zeldes]

I'd argue that many of the people who succumb to this addiction are not doing it based on a conscious, reasoned decision, any more than substance abuse addicts are...