good and bad urgency

Urgency is a way to infuse priority into your actions.

There is good urgency and bad urgency. I'm gonna give some examples to help you decide which is which.

Good urgency, like deadlines for projects, be it personal projects or professional ones. It's especially good if you are attempting to create art AND you are a perfectionist. The more perfectionist you are, the more you need to be urgent about the things you create. Good art and good projects aren't made by sitting down and overthinking, they are made by tinkering and refinement. But they need a limit so you dont overstay your welcome in them.

Bad urgency, the urgency of other things you don't care about that people want you to. It's the car salesman trying to get you to sign the buy papers, it's the university rep who won't leave you alone. It's you trying to get you to care about something.

Even worse urgency is urgency engineered to keep you using apps/social media/products you wouldn't care about if they didn't come from a screen with pretty colors and big numbers showing artificial units of social connection.

Urgency is a tool, and you need it after you have decided what you need to do; you don't use it to decide what is important to do. It's a tool for doing, not for deciding. And I believe this post is of paramount importance because of how our urgency meter is being hacked by tech companies today.

Here's what we will discuss in this post:

• social media isn't urgent
• small experiment to reset my urgency meter
• using urgency to your advantage

social media isn't urgent

Whether we like to admit it or not, social media is a part of our lives, and it is how we keep in touch with long-distance friends, but we should use it intentionally, not let ourselves be swayed by tech companies that don't care about our real priorities or goals.

Some people choose to delete all apps, whether for peace of mind, productivity, or even to be more present in their day to day lives. This is already becoming a trend:

• A step-by-step guide on deleting your social media accounts
• Deleting all social media : r/productivity - Reddit
• spending too much time on social media - regrets.io

Instead of letting others hijack my sense of belonging and social community to keep me addicted to platforms, I decided on a different path.

small experiment to reset my urgency meter

I've been running an experiment these past few weeks. I bought a scheduling tool to post on X(formerly Twitter) so that I can just open it, write down thoughts for tweets(or xweets haha), and schedule them in advance.

I did this for three reasons:

• I always have ideas for posts during my day, but every time I opened to post them, I'd get derailed into reading lots and lots of posts, notifications, groupchats, etc.
• Related to the first point, I felt like my time was not under my command, social media has been engineered constantly to suck off all attention of a human being to make stock price go up.
• I ran digital detox experiments before, where I didn't check any social media for a month, and I always came back from it more creative, more present, and with more desire to create things in my life. I want to live my life more like this than being reactive to what the latest political movement or company wants me to react to.

But then again, I make lots of friends there, and I want to participate in their lives too, that's why I spend so many hours in group chats and on the timeline replying to their posts.

So clearly I can't just disappear and just post there, it wouldn't be fun, and I'd alienate all my friends there who keep replying to my scheduled posts.

So what I'm doing these past few weeks is:

• I schedule posts and don't check notifications for most days of the week.
• Except Thursday and Friday(that means I delete the apps when I log off on Friday, and reinstall every Thursday).
• And I only access social media after 2 pm on these days(I use freedom.to to keep me following this).

I chose these days because I like doing most of my day job's heavy tasks on the first three days of the week. I feel like using social media even after the afternoon, early on in the week, kills my sense of focus for the remainder of the day.

I often find that even on thursdays and fridays I don't check it as much, I chat with friends, and then my mind is moved elsewhere.

I feel like this is a good compromise, and I'm willing to keep that for a little while longer and see if I feel like I should add more days on the weekends to catch up on friends or not.

Once I did this, I started having a different relationship with "urgency". I no longer felt the dread of urgent things or feeling constantly behind on things. Instead, I started seeing in my life areas where urgency could be used for good. As I started saying at the beginning of this post, urgency is a survival tool, and as with any tool, it has its place.

So I started experimenting to create urgency in things I cared about doing in life.

using urgency to your advantage

You might be tempted to create good urgency artificially. Say you want to learn how to draw, you give yourself 15 days to learn to draw an anime panel that you love. That's not going to work. Allow me to explain.

Your brain knows that this is a fake deadline, at the back of your mind it'ts gonna keep asking "so what happens in 15 days if I don't do it?". It knows nothing will happen.

But there is a trick you can employ.

Make yourself accountable, say you create a pact with a friend that if you can't draw the panel well enough to be passable in 15 days, you give money to that friend so that they can then spend it on a charity you really don't support.

Another way you can create good urgency is if you are like me and want to learn to play the guitar fast. I'd love to think I'm the most diligent and disciplined person ever, and that I would practice for hours every day. But I'm not. At least not without an incentive. So what's my incentive?

I enrolled in a guitar learning program that is going to place me in a band to play songs in 20 days in front of a live audience. Do I know enough to play in 20 days? No way in hell, but that's a real incentive if anything. I don't want to let my other bandmates down, so that gives me some fire to practice every day.

It's easy to let yourself go and give yourself a reason to "unwind" after work, but when other people depend on you, or you have any social obligation to do something, then things take on a different gear.

last words

So use urgency in your own life, don't let others dictate your decisions, but use that "social monkey" brain to your advantage, use it to hold yourself accountable once you do decide what it is you want to do.