Over the years of being embedded in the tech industry, I've noticed that the meaning of urgency is morphing and is being used as a tool to capture our attention. And I think I've been a victim of this.

Everything feels urgent: that message on my WhatsApp, the email I just received, or those RSS updates I need to go through. If everything competes to be urgent, what is truly urgent?

I sometimes feel as if a concurrent world of urgencies were competing for my parallel mental processing. For non-tech-savvy people, concurrency and parallelism are not the same thing. I jump from one thing to another, considering everything urgent, and ending up exhausted at the end of the day. I think it's normal, considering those jumps are sometimes between non-related domains.

I did not realize my tendency to consider many things urgent and my consequential mental exhaustion. I've been thinking about it for some time, but with the building of the company, I'm noticing I have to get better at identifying where the urgency lays, if any, and how to deal with it.

Suppose you wonder how it manifests. I can have the mail application closed, but it feels uncomfortable because I do so with the feeling that something urgent might come up. Or some message shows up from a person seeking support, and I feel like stopping what I'm doing to provide help. Or I have some spare time, filling it with checking social channels just in case something worth my attention is happening. Is it an addiction? Maybe? It's as if my brain was constantly alert, waiting for the next urgent thing. It's exhausting.

Brains are damn difficult to understand.

And to make matters worse, I'm terrible at establishing systems or processes. My brain is a bit chaotic, and I think some of my creativity is rooted in that chaos. In the connections that emerge from there. However, the mix is dangerous if you combine that with the constant feeling of urgency.

So, despite how comfortable it might feel, I'll try to establish some system, both at work and at the personal level. First, I'll treat the stream of things as a queue, where the focus is not on the urgency (or the importance) of something but on whether it is well-categorized. Then, I'll devote the last 30 minutes to review, assign urgency and importance, and plan my next day based on that. This one step is the one I need to build a routine around.

If something comes up during the day, I'll resist jumping into it and instead add it to the queue. Then, review it at the end of the day and repeat the process. And I'll establish a boundary between work and personal life:

  • Work: Slack, GitHub, Desktop Mail - Personal: Telegram, WhatsApp, iPhone Mail, In-person

I used to have work things on my phone, but that blurred the line between work and personal life in a way that was not healthy for me or the company.

Will this work? It will if I commit to building the habit and stick to it. Whether I'll be able to commit is a whole different story, but let's talk about that in a future blog post.

If you are going through some mental struggles or learning about mental health and want to chat, I'm always up for it. Just reach out.