What's Actually Urgent?

The difference between what shouts and what matters

What's actually urgent in your life right now?

Not what feels urgent. Not what's labeled urgent. Not what someone else has convinced you is urgent. But genuinely, truly urgent.

I asked myself this question around 2 in the morning while staring at my phone, reading work emails marked "URGENT" that had arrived hours earlier. My thumb hovered over the reply button as my eyes burned from the blue light. The house was silent. And somewhere in that moment of late-night digital anxiety, a more interesting question emerged:

Why does urgency always feel like it belongs to someone else?

We live in an era where everything demands immediate attention. Apps ping. Inboxes flash. Headlines scream. Each notification carries the implicit message: "Drop what you're doing. This cannot wait." But whose timeline are we actually operating on? And what happens to the quiet, important things that never announce themselves as urgent at all?

When was the last time you received a notification that said: "Your mental health needs attention right now" or "This relationship requires your presence immediately" or "The small joys of your day are waiting to be noticed"?

The truly essential rarely comes with flashing lights and capital letters. It whispers. It waits. It exists in the spaces between our reactions to what feels urgent.

So perhaps the better question isn't "what's urgent?"—but rather, "what's important that isn't shouting at me?"

How would your attention change if you responded to importance rather than urgency? What would rise to the surface if you let the manufactured emergencies settle?

I've started to wonder if urgency itself might be the modern addiction we're least willing to acknowledge. The rush of responding immediately. The dopamine hit of clearing notifications. The strange satisfaction of putting out fires—even ones we could have prevented with slower, more deliberate attention.

What if we measured success not by how quickly we respond, but by how wisely we choose what deserves our response in the first place?

I don't have perfect answers to these questions. But I've started experimenting with letting some urgent things remain unaddressed while I attend to important things that would never demand my attention. And in that inversion, I've found a different kind of aliveness—one that operates on human time rather than digital time.

What version of yourself might emerge if you stopped organizing your life around what seems most urgent?

That might be the most important question of all.

—Everett

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