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It is 9:00 AM on a Monday morning and you have two choices: clear out the 22 unread emails sitting in your inbox, answering quick questions that technically need a response by noon, or spend the next hour drafting a 3-year strategic plan. One task is important; the other is merely urgent.
We live in an era where extreme responsiveness has become a proxy for competence. We wear our busyness like a badge of honor, confusing the volume of our activity with the value of our impact. However, this addiction to the immediate is not just a time-management issue; it is a priority management issue, and it is seeking instant gratification that actively sabotages our ability to lead. For the high-performing individual contributor transitioning into leadership, this trap is particularly dangerous. Speed, reliability, and having all the answers are the very habits that led to your promotion, but they are also the same habits that will cause you to flounder as a first-time people leader.
Why do we choose trivial tasks over transformative tasks?
Our brains are wired to prioritize closure. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research identifies this phenomenon as the “Mere Urgency Effect.” People consistently chose to perform tasks with urgency (e.g., deal with a deadline that is close) over tasks without deadlines, even when the urgent tasks offered a significantly lower payoff. Urgency creates a “goal-gradient” effect; as the deadline approaches, our desire to complete the task intensifies, regardless of the task’s actual importance. We choose the email over the strategy document, not because it is better for the organization, but because finishing it provides an immediate reduction in the feeling of anxiousness and a quick hit of psychological closure.
This biological hardwiring is compounded by what researchers call completion bias. Think about how checking items off your to-do list releases dopamine. The brain rewards us for the act of completion, not the quality of the outcome. For an ambitious employee, the inbox is a candy store of easy dopamine hits. Every send button pressed feels like a win.
The hidden blocker of urgency
Recent work by executive coach Muriel Wilkins suggests the problem for leaders transitioning isn’t a lack of skills; it is that when someone is promoted from an individual contributor to a leader, there are “hidden blockers.” Consider the typical career trajectory: An employee excels because they are hyper-responsive. They solve problems instantly. They are the “go-to” person who puts out fires. Management sees this reliability and promotes them, but once in the leadership chair, the game changes. The goal is no longer doing the work. The goal is now to build the capacity of the team to do the work. However, the new leader is fighting years of muscle memory.
Also, when a crisis arises for this new leader, their instinct is to dive in and fix it, choosing the urgent. By doing so, they inadvertently create a culture of learned helplessness. If the leader always answers the email in five minutes, the team learns they never have to think for themselves. The leader becomes the bottleneck, buried in low-value urgent tasks, while the high-value important work, like mentoring, strategic long-term planning, and culture building, are all perpetually deferred.
Breaking the addiction to urgency
Here are three practical solutions for a new or emerging leader learning to rewire their brains:
1. Practice Strategic Inaccessibility. The “Mere Urgency Effect” thrives on availability. Thus, if you are constantly plugged in, you are constantly reactive. Leaders must manufacture friction between themselves and the inflow of urgent trivia, so institute “deep work time” focused on important work for two hours a day. No email, no Slack, no open door. By physically removing the cues of urgency (e.g., notifications), you lower the cognitive cost of ignoring them. You are not unresponsive; you are strategically inaccessible.
2. Implement the “30-Minute Rule” for Delegation. As a high-performing individual contributor, the thought “It will take me longer to explain it than to just do it myself” may be true in the short term, but in the long term, it is fatal for you as a leader and for your team. To counter this, implement the 30-Minute Rule. When an urgent task lands on your desk that could be done by someone else, force yourself to pause. If you can teach someone to do it in 30 minutes or less, even if doing it yourself would only take you 5 minutes, you must teach others to do it. Think of it as investing 25 minutes of “wasted” time now to buy back hundreds of hours in the future.
3. Audit Your False Urgency. Finally, leaders must recognize that they are often the source of the urgency they despise. A study in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology highlights how “telepressure,” the urge to respond to work messages immediately, is often contagious. When a leader sends non-critical emails at 10:00 PM or demands updates on minor issues, they validate the urgency culture. A solution is to decouple your working hours from their working hours. If you clear your inbox on Sunday night to feel organized, schedule those emails to be sent on Monday morning. Also, explicitly define what constitutes an emergency because if everything is urgent, nothing is.
Transitioning from doing to leading is uncomfortable because it requires us to let go of the tasks that got us promoted in the first place. Tasks that made us feel safe, seen, and valued. But leadership requires a different kind of courage. It means resisting the pull of the familiar ping of an unread email and instead sitting in the quiet discomfort of bigger, less-defined projects. It means learning to delegate, develop others, and trust your team, even when it feels easier to just do it yourself.
